Gathering information and interviews to start the project
So the decision is to build/develop some kind of BI model, let’s assume it’s Sales model.
How do you begin?
Where do you go?
What? Where? How!?
Well, as I mentioned in previous posts you should know the business.
After you learned it, start to interview your main users, I usually start with the “field” personal. First, those people usually knows best the processes, all the tricks and always can refer you to those unique information sources that you will need. Cherish those people, they will promote your project and probably will be the most frequent users of that soon to developed model. As your interviews go up the chain of management, you will see that the requirements of the model in most cases already written by the previous level of management. Never the less, always write everything and who asked for it. So how this interactive process (I called it the interview) between you and the user/client goes? At first, ask the Interviewee to describe his work, then I usually ask those questions:
How does he start the day?
What difficulties does he have in carrying out his work?
What was missing at work?
What would help him do his job efficiently?
Review the interviewer's reports and / or presentations (of course it is important to ask in advance to come up with the relevant materials for the meeting), see how you can facilitate all the preparation and make the information more accessible. An important question that I usually ask: What is the first thing you would like to see in the morning? The goal is to produce a view called "Good Morning", which gives the user a relevant view that will make it easier for the job and direct it to other tasks Of course, it depends on the level of management that currently being interviewed, but I usually ask - what data do you want to receive in "push"? If you can get data into a particular folder or email without opening the model.
Try to be a psychologist, try to identify the important things, things that if you give them to the user, he will be satisfied and will be interested in using more and more model you developed.
After all, the goal of this model is to maximize the use and certainly to develop something that the organization needs and uses.
After all the interviews, we sit down to write a specification document and / or a requirements document. I will write about it in future posts.
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