Warehouse Project Model Oracle Tips by Burleson Consulting

The Data Warehouse Development Life Cycle

Warehouse Project Model 

* The ability to “roll-up” to the highest level of summarization for the purpose of identifying tasks that are on the critical path for the entire project. (Remember, while each sub-manager must deal with their own critical paths, the top-level project manager must recognize that some of these critical tasks will also appear on the critical path for the overall project.)

* The ability to tie human capabilities to tasks while weighing the relative skills of the human resources. For example, a “guru” level C++ programmer can write a program 4 times faster than a “standard” level C++ programmer, who, in turn, writes code 2 times faster than a “newbie” level C++ programmer.

* A modeling facility which can be used to create and test what-if scenarios. There are three categories of modeling:

   * Additional resources are applied to a project to accelerate delivery dates (crashing the project).

   * Human resources are re-allocated to tasks, and the expected delivery dates for all sub-tasks are recomputed.

   * Delivery times for major milestones can be quickly recomputed from current delivery estimates, providing the top management with the most critical in-process subtasks.

There are several project management software packages in the marketplace to assist with managing a data warehouse project. The most popular software for very large projects include Primavera, P2, and Artemis. For smaller projects, Table 2.5 provides a list of popular tools for small- to medium-size projects.

SOFTWARE TOOL                                        VENDOR
Project                                                      Microsoft
CA-Superproject                                         Computer Associates
Timeline                                                     Sysmantic
Instaplan                                                   Instaplan Inc.
FlowCharting                                              Patton & Patton
Mac Project                                                Claris
Project                                                      Scitoc
Project Management                                    Primavera Systems

Table 2.5 Popular project management software for smaller projects.

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

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