Lessons from a Successful Data Warehousing Project Management

Abstract

This article provides an overview of project management aspects of a data warehouse application implementation. More specifically, the article discusses the project's implementation, challenges faced, and lessons learned. The project was initiated with an objective to redesign the procurement data pipeline of a data warehouse. The data flows from enterprise resource planning (ERP) system to enterprise data warehouse (EDW) to reporting environments. This project was challenged to deliver more quickly to the consumers with improved report performance, and reduced total cost of ownership (TCO) in EDW and data latency. Strategies of this project include providing continuous business value, and adopt new technologies in data extraction, transformation and loading. The project's strategy was also to implement it using some of the agile principles. The project team accomplished twice the scope of previous project in the same duration with a relatively smaller team. It also achieved improved quality of the products, and increased customer satisfaction by improving the reports' response time for management.