Data warehouse project management Oracle Tips by Burleson Consulting

The Data Warehouse Development Life Cycle

Warehouse Project Management  

Effective Project Management 

In general, there are two levels of project management: top-level project management, which controls the overall warehouse project, and functional management, which incorporates everyone involved in the operational details associated with each specific milestone of the project.

The size of a warehouse project does not really impact how the project is modeled and controlled. While there are numerous tools, such as PERT (Project Evaluation and Review Technique), that can be used for very large data warehouse projects, all warehouse projects are fundamentally the same; the only variables are the number of sub-projects and the complexity of integrating the sub-projects.

A very large warehouse project, such as building an enterprise-wide data model for a large corporation, may involve thousands of milestones and man-centuries of effort, but they still maintain the fundamental nature of a warehouse project. The issues are purely a matter of scale. However, it is comforting to see that a data warehouse project, even with a man-century of effort, is relatively small when compared to other projects such as building an aircraft carrier which could consume the full-time efforts of thousands of people for several years. The term “man-century” refers to 100 years of labor, and is equivalent to 100 people working full-time for a year. Table 2.3 shows three levels of project size. As you can see, a data warehouse project is generally classified as a medium-size project.

Project Size                        Number Of Tasks                  Project Duration
Small                                 Hundreds                            Months
Medium                              Thousands                          Years
Large                                 Millions                               Decades

Table 2.3 Levels of project size.

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This is an excerpt from "High Performance Data Warehousing", copyright 1997.

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