Different roles in a typical BI project

Today, I would like to talk about the different roles in a typical BI project. Like all technology-related initiatives, it is vital to assign clear responsibilities and distinguish different responsibilities in order to achieve a successful BI project result.

• Project Manager – This role is needed to understand the overall scope of the BI project including the objectives, timeline, budget, and resources. Based on these parameters, they will need to work with other individuals within the project team to come up with timelines and resource assignments. During the development phase, he/she will monitor the project’s progress and make adjustments as needed.
• BI Solution Architect – This person will be in charge of the overall design of the data warehouse. They will focus on creating the vision of the entire BI process, development and lifecycle. They will work directly with business users and the project manager to design actionable insights while concurrently working with the ETL developer, DBAs, and Data Modelers to break down the vision into detailed actionable tasks.
• Data modelers – The Data Modelers will be responsible with the design of the data warehouse schema and the data models. They need to understand the business requirements, the vision produced by the BI solutions architect, and the physical capabilities of the environment. In addition, the will be responsible for creating the data warehouse schema, the ETL requirements, the data models, and the design model processing schedules.’
• Database Administrators (DBA) – These individuals will be in charge of designing the physical Database Architecture and configuration, security settings, as well as data source identification and data source management.
• Infrastructure Specialists – These individuals are responsible for ensuring that the servers and networks are set up correctly to meet the current and future requirements. They will also be responsible for the server upgrade and migration.
• ETL Developers – The ETL Developers are responsible for building the workflows from external source to the Data Warehouse. They will be working closely with the DBAs and Data modelers to understand the source and target form of the data as well as the timing of ETL workflows.
• Report developers – These individuals, of all the other roles, work closest with the business users. Their role is to work with business users to design the reports and schedule automated report generation while providing the data modelers with future model requirements.
• Business users – These individuals provide requirements to the BI development team. They provide initial abstract pertaining to what they want at the beginning of the project. As prototype products come out, these abstracts become more detailed and final.
• Testers – Testers are responsible for Unit Testing, Integration Testing, Functional Testing, and Systems Testing. Performance Testing, Usability Testing and Acceptance Testing.

(https://www.codeproject.com/Tips/351122/What-is-software-testing-What-are-the-different-ty)

Often time, all the project team members work closely with each other. Usually, for a large project, one or more team members will wear multiple hats pertaining the roles above. In smaller BI teams, one person may play different roles. Although this may create some extra burden in terms of workload, it reduces the onerous need for establishing communication between different persons. I usually see the BI solution architect, data modeler and ETL developer to be one person at the beginning of the development phase and as the project grows, that person will begin outsourcing his/her roles to other team members.

Thanks,

Your friend – Annie