Frank Buytendijk Blog

My previous post on the responsibilities of "the business" and "IT"  when defining a business case and discussing the Return On Investment seemed to have stricken a nerve.

The basic discussion is about the deliverables for a BI project. Paul Gallagher stated that this is not "let's define 20 reports," but that it is what is being done with that information. I responded that the "business" is often criticizing IT about not realizing the business case or the ROI and argued that it is the business itself who is responsible for that.

Check out Tom Hudock's blog entry in which he adds:

When I want a vehicle to drive, I don't ask the mechanic to find one for me. Although I'm sure the car would be great under the hood. Because maybe I want my unique style, colour, prestige, the right growl to the engine. Aesthetics. Generally not a mechanic's forte.

Then Erin McCune, who runs a blog for finance professionals, also weighs in with:

As I've emphasized many times in this blog and in my articles systems projects are doomed to fail when business stakeholders fail to take an active role.

In the meantime, Gints Plivna comes with a great real-life example in his blog:

Some days ago I've spotted a nice estimate of a work task that takes the problem described above to the next level i.e. the core of problem is initiated even before the real project begins. Task was much bigger containing of many subtasks including:
1) three separated subtasks for three different reports. Each report was quite precisely explained;
2) a task formulated as follows: "Up to 20 reports defined more accurately in analysis phase". No more information was supplied, no more information was known to anyone.

So how do you think - what were the estimates for analysis and implementation? According to estimate analysis of each separated report should take 1, 2 and 3 workdays. Implementation estimate of each of them was 2, 3.5 and 3.5 workdays. And now the most interesting part: analysis and implementation of up to 20 unknown reports was estimated 15 days for analysis and 20 days for implementation.

So for known and quite precisely defined reports the average analysis and implementation work was estimated 2 and 3 days respectively for each report. BUT for completely unknown reports without any further information and/or restriction estimate was 0.75 days for analysis and 1 day for implementation.

It seems we still have a long way to go...

frank