Clickstream

Late Projects: Dante Applied to Data Warehousing

It isn't exactly project hell, but it's close. I've been to project hell several times. Being a connoisseur of the various circles of project hell, what I'm doing now is more like heck, with a few dalliances in the first circle of hell. Thus, extracurricular blogging slowed down this month.

The nice thing about my current project is that it has a long and involved history, much like the history of napalm, with it's deep roots in the combative use of combustion going back to Greek fire. The project's history stretches back to the dim recesses of an earlier age, at least from the perspective of the users and sponsors.

I've never been on a data warehouse project that took more than a year to get from start to a usable application. The projects usually delivered a first release within 6-9 months, and the first deliverable was always usable. Until Project Speedbump.

When Fred Brooks answered the question "How do projects get a year behind?" with "One day at a time" he had not yet encountered the IT department of the 21st century. My answer at this point would be "One day at a time, in incredible leaps of weeks and months."

The problems we currently face have nothing to do with technology, users or project management. When this project is finished and I've worked through the post-mortem I will write a lot more about Project Speedbump because it is definitely instructive to look at the situations DW/BI practitioners can find themselves in, where everything is aligned perfectly behind the project except IT management.

Posted by Mark Thursday, December 02, 2004 10:31:00 PM | permalink |