business thinking

Its the Data Quality, Stupid

Neil — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 09:09:52 +0000

Data Quality is important. Business performance depends on good decisions. And good business decisions need to be illuminated by data if management are to avoid making decisions in the dark. For example – if sales are below target, then sales data may provide information on sales representative performance, by product, by region – a rich [...]

Requirements Have Levels – Sorting and Linking

Neil — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 11:00:02 +0000

This is article 2 on the use of requirements management techniques for business intelligence projects. When you try to assemble requirements for your new project, to agree what it is you are going to do and not going to do (whether you use traditional or agile approaches to requirements elicitation) you end up with all [...]

Sales Playbooks

Neil — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 11:00:01 +0000

Playbook: an American sports term - it is a book or booklet that diagrams and explains a compilation of strategies a team may use during match games. Managing a sales team can be difficult. Salespeople, by nature, make thing happen. They move fast, often faster than the business can keep up with them. And there lies a problem. If a salesperson [...]

Review: Understanding A3 Thinking

Neil — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 11:00:21 +0000

disclaimer: link provided to Amazon for your convenience, if you visit and buy we will receive a small commission. In my reading into agile techniques I keep coming across references to A3 management. I learned that projects could be managed using a summary laid out on an A3 piece of paper, and I could see [...]

Business Intelligence Requirements Management

Neil — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 14:53:51 +0000

Introduction Business intelligence projects are different. The nature of the work, the breadth of knowledge, the volume of data, and system integration expertise needed make developing such systems very different from classic system development or package implementation type work. Over the last 10 years, we have seen great strides forward in the way software systems [...]