W3i Tech Talk: Closing the Loop on Business Intelligence Development
Over the past few years, our Business Intelligence group developed solutions under the SCRUM Agile development methodology. The SCRUM methodology provides a superb framework for the development process, however, we started to encounter shortfalls with regard to widespread understanding of what information was available for consumption and, more importantly, how to leverage that information to derive business value.
After stepping back and taking a look at how we as a Business Intelligence Team architected, developed, and released our solutions, we were hard pressed to locate a flaw in the process – Development commitments were being met every sprint, team members were engaged and enjoyed their work, the information made available by our solutions was accurate and timely. Why weren’t more people using this new information? Why hadn’t we taken over the world yet with this new found insight?
“Because we never fully explained how to use it.”
Well, that’s not entirely true as ad-hoc training sessions occurred quite frequently; and we even held multiple, large-scale sessions throughout the years, but the argument was made that our priorities focused largely on solution development and minimally on education. In hindsight, it is quite ridiculous to assume that the existence of new information is intrinsically valuable – information is only as valuable as we make it.
This realization threw a little bit of a wrench in our well-oiled SCRUM sprints as there was now this new need, “show and tell” if you will. SCRUM has a mechanism for this in the form of a Business Review where developers demonstrate what was created, walk through new features and interfaces check off functional requirements and illustrate how the solution meets all specified acceptance criteria. Traditionally, this business review happens between sprint iterations directly after the previous iteration’s stories are released. While we faithfully conducted Business Reviews to introduce our solutions to business users – that is all we did, introduce them.
We have since committed to setting aside a certain percentage of every Business Intelligence Developer’s resources each sprint to spend time working with these solutions and presenting compelling demonstrations of how to leverage these solutions to derive business value, support initiatives, and, of course, conquer the world.
Never get too wrapped up in all your business intelligence – you may lose sight of the business.
Tim Laqua, Business Intelligence Team Lead, W3i, LLC
Tim uses his three years experience in Business Intelligence and 10+ years in the field of Software Development to lead his team here at W3i.
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