A pig and a chicken are walking down a road. The chicken looks at the pig and says, “Hey, why don’t we open a restaurant?” The pig looks back at the chicken and says, “Good idea, what do you want to call it?” The chicken thinks about it and says, “Why don’t we call it ‘Ham and Eggs’?” “I don’t think so,” says the pig, “I’d be committed but you’d only be involved.”
If you’ve read Ken Schwaber’s book ‘Agile Project Management with Scrum’ you’d know where this joke came from. I first heard about Agile a few months ago when I saw the Agile Manifesto pinned to the back of a colleague’s workstation- have a look at the words and tell me something. Is this appropriate as a methodology for development and delivery of BI? I happen to think it is, by a country mile. The words make perfect sense and if you read Ken’s book, so does the methodology.
Being an exiled POM, I cut my PM teeth with PRINCE and PRINCE2 and much as I take comfort in all that planning and definition, I have found it really difficult to apply to BI/DW development. So with that in mind we’re going to give Scrum a go. We have a significant project to deliver before the end of this year and right now the requirement is vague but the pressure is on to deliver. I’ll let you know how we go. If you are interested, please drop me a line or just a comment, it would be really useful to share war stories on this one.
Oh, and if you needed any further indication of relevance, I was talking to Don Campbell, Cognos’ CTO about this last week and guess what - Cognos use Scrum for their product development…
Rob,
I have been a fan of Scrum for some time. I came to Project Management via Engineering, where projects take place in a slow, orderly and controlled manner.
Despite the best attempts and intent, IT project management in general and Business Intelligence in particular occurs in spurts. Everyone sits around typing up documents, looking at problems and reviewing potential solutions, and then in a flurry of activity the next component is created. The vagueness of requirements and uncertainty of outcomes lends BI to this methodology.
Scrum accepts this methodology and puts some formal control over it.
I have been working on a BI specific Scrum methodology for some time. I will email you my efforts to date if you are interested.
I would be very interested to see your BI specific scrum efforts and I’m sure this is something that would interest others, please send it over and lets talk. I think its great that you also believe BI is well suited to the approach, hopefully I can post more information on this topic soon.