LancetCoach - Project Mentoring for MicroStrategy

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TEACHING INDEPENDENCE, NOT CREATING DEPENDENCIES When faced with new projects, companies often struggle to assemble teams that possess the necessary BI/Data Warehousing skills and experience. Do you invest in staff education or hire a consultant to do the job for you? Why not both? The LancetCoach™ approach allows your staff to learn "on-the-job" under expert supervision and guidance while achieving REAL results.

Project ExecutionInitiating a new Business Intelligence (BI) project or program can be both time-consuming and costly. IT leaders who adopt BI tools are typically under pressure to create new, impactful applications which often require the use of unfamiliar tools and techniques. Delivering sound BI solutions that meet high user expectations can be a serious challenge - at least until the development team has matured through a successful BI implementation.

MENTORING... NOT CONTRACTING

Many mid-size organizations prefer to take a "Do It Yourself" approach to constructing their strategic applications. This has advantages, since no one knows their business better than the folks inside. While some have succeeded, many teams have struggled, spending months or even years on false starts, blind alleys and time-consuming reinvention of best practices. On numerous occasions, Lancet has been called in to provide strategic advice and assistance to rescue these floundering BI initiatives. We have taken our years of experience on hundreds of successful BI projects and used it to create LancetCoach. This program combines a fast start with ongoing project mentoring to those organizations who wish to do the bulk of implementation work themselves. This yields an optimal combination of lower-cost development, with our pragmatic processes to ensure speed, and experienced BI guidance.

THE LancetCoach DIFFERENCE

Each client is assigned an experienced and industry-savvy Lancet consultant - also known as the "Coach." The Coach acts as a personal BI mentor to your team by providing best practices, insights and/or recommendations they have either used themselves or seen successfully implemented at other customer sites. Depending on your specific needs the Coach can work with your team to ensure business requirements are well understood. The Coach can help identify necessary data sources and assist in the architecture and design of a data mart or data warehouse which will optimally perform within your MicroStrategy environment. The Coach can also help translate reporting requirements into viable BI reporting deliverables your business owners need in order to make better informed decisions.

Each LancetCoach is a certified MicroStrategy developer. Their expertise spans all aspects of the product suite, as well as the entire BI development lifecycle, so you can be assured requirements turn into deliverables quickly and efficiently. The Coach will direct the reporting team to ensure clear understanding of the requirements and deliverables. Should questions arise during the development process, the Coach will be there to guide your team.

In addition to mentoring, your team will receive a customized project roadmap and a variety of project documentation templates Lancet has developed over the years. For example, report specifications are documented using Lancet's Report Definition Document (RDD) and Metric Definition Document (MDD) templates. These templates have been adopted as standards by Lancet clients nation-wide. Each template has been refined over time to ensure they effectively capture all necessary business requirements. At the same time, they become an essential repository of information to be used by developers in creating end-user reports. Frequently these documents are also leveraged for user acceptance testing, as well as end user training once the reports are fully implemented.

At each stage of the project, the LancetCoach will provide a thorough walk through and acceptance review via a teleconference and web-based application sharing sessions. Lancet understands that individuals learn best by performing the work themselves. By having your team complete the majority of the work while having the Coach available as a safety net maximizes knowledge transfer, keeps consulting costs low, and builds confidence in your team.

HOW IT WORKS

A LancetCoach mentored project typically follows a 12-16 week project life-cycle customized to fit your organization's particular needs. A sample LancetCoach program is outlined below:

Weeks 1 and 2

Your LancetCoach will conduct an initial onsite visit in order to meet your team, assess your business needs by gaining a better understanding of your specific business model, review existing or create new data models, provide advice on data and BI governance, identify user reports which best suit your business needs or provide guidance on how best to leverage various project documentation. In addition, the LancetCoach will provide a customized roadmap and other project document templates to give the team a head start on best design practices. Educational needs may be discussed and an educational plan crafted to make sure the team has the right skills to create the applications outlined in the requirements. The Coach may also review your existing MicroStrategy environment and arrange for secure remote access to your development environment. The length of the visit will depend on the size and complexity of the data model, business requirements, and requested reports.

Weeks 3 and 4

Your LancetCoach works with your team to review Report Requirements documents and data sources.

Weeks 5 and 6

Your team works on updating the data model, and reviews the final data model with the LancetCoach.

Weeks 7 and 8

Your team creates data loading logic to populate a data mart, and works with the LancetCoach on data quality testing.

Weeks 9 and 10

Your LancetCoach works with your team to successfully map the data mart tables into MicroStrategy and to create necessary Attributes, Facts, and Metrics.

Weeks 11 and 12

Your LancetCoach works with your team to build MicroStrategy reports that meet the Report Definition Document specifications.

Weeks 13 and 14

Your LancetCoach works with your team to finalize documentation, quality testing, and user acceptance testing.

ADDITIONAL BENEFITS

Iterative Prototyping

Project sponsors may have trouble imagining how reports will look and feel once implemented in your environment. We can offer iterative prototyping within a LancetCoach engagement. With an understanding of your requirements and sample data, we assist your team to quickly develop a working prototype that simulates the final deliverables of a larger project before significant effort takes place. Iterative prototyping ensures common understanding so time and money are not wasted.

Ongoing Support

Lancet is committed to every client's success and provides support whenever needed. We've earned a reputation based on reliability, accuracy, and honesty. We pride ourselves on the professional relationships we've fostered over the years and continue to leverage our expertise to ensure our clients' success.