Earlier this week I talked about the value of process. But what happens when the steps kill the project.
This is where experience is crucial. Being able to be comfortable and understanding the process you are working to follow allows you to be able to identify when a step can be modified and what the various downstream repurcussions are. An example from this week was:
Wanting to help a client automate a process, we looked to leverage a sandbox that was being created to replace a manual process. Easy-peasy.
The issue was the downstream issues based on not using a proper and pure production environment. Happily the team that was doing a Rapid Results approach to this had an understanding of the issues that this would create (back-up, change control, support,…) and be able to either shoot the solution or find the work-outs to address them.
This was an example where if we had had to go to a full big P production solution the cost of this simple automation would have exceeded the project budget for the bigger project. That would have meant that the business would not have been able to get their solution, the Enterprise Data Warehouse would be thought as too expensive and someone else would have found a work-around and no-one would win.
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Easy — PEASY?! —
In the world of BIG Data Warehouses we always run into the conflicts of responsiveness to the business needs against the production environments need for stability, supportability, data consistency & quality and of course in the post SOx world tracability, security & privacy.
Easy peasy — how about oil and vinegar — Popeye and Bluto — Batman and The Joker.
The beauty of the sandbox (some people don’t like the term) is to create a place where people can load data they are not sure about, compare it with data they are sure about (like from the EDW) and then make informed decisions about the value of bringing the sandbox data into the controlled EDW environment, based on the value it WILL bring as opposed to the value it might bring if we had to speculate on its value.
Easy Peasy!
What a great example of the value of using interim steps towards a long term project. Being able to make such corrections early in a project is a real value of the Rapid Results approach. Glad to see the approach helps and also reinforced using the process as a checklist.