Need Guidance on starting a new First BI project

[saumil287]

Hi All,
I have created models and reports for Inhouse reporting needs.
Now We are getting a new First project BI.
So Now I want to know how do we start the project.
What are the steps from Requirements gathering to building solutions.
Is there any books or link which can help us from start to end of a project .
What SDLC , the cognos follow.

Your guidance is appreciated a lot.
Thanks in advance

[wyconian]

Hi

That's a very open question lol.  I guess it depends on how formal you need to be.

I've had clients that want everything up front before you start developing everything.  That covers BRD (business requirment doc), functional spec (response to the BRD covering general principles on how we are going to meet the requirements and address the non functional requirements), High Level Design (high level explanation of what we are going to do) Low Level design (main design doc, has explicit details of what tables will be used, etl routines, source to target mappings, data defintions/dictionary, data flows etc etc).

My current client is happy with a very basic design on 1 A4 sheet :-)

I found Kimball's datawarehouse life cycle toolkit (that may be a mix of 2 titles) really useful, if you get the right one it even has templates on a cd for various design docs.

I think most developers find documentation a real pain :-) but it can be useful when getting things signed off, understanding requirements, getting agreement on design principles etc and can be really useful in preventing scope creep.

Good luck :-)

[saumil287]

Hi wyconian,
Thank you for your reply.