Six Ways To Have Fun With Business Intelligence …!

Are you having fun? Should you be? Could you be? Should work be fun? What about study, exercise, or politics; should they be? This post thinks they should and I agree, so I thought I should see if it can apply to Business Intelligence (BI). 

Here are six ideas:

Be Inquisitive

 

Indulge yourself in your data a little: roll your sleeves up, start digging and see what you find! Justify the time away from what you should have been doing by not just finding something interesting but acting on it.

Build a Balanced Team

One thing that is sure to drain not only fun but sanity is spending time fire fighting when things go wrong on a BI project. Ensure that you have experience in your team, so that you can head off the fires before they start through good planning. NB experience in this case means not length of time served but track record! Mix this with more junior role for enthusiasm, cost and avoiding ego clashes. 

Choose a Fun Tool 

There is a new breed of tools available that are not only easier for end users to use but also easy for the project team to deliver. BI has been around for getting on for 20 years and the new breed of tools package up a lot of the best practice within the product. Talk to DSCallards, we can make recommendations.

Set High Long Term and Realistic Short Term Expectations With Stakeholders

BI is more of a journey than a destination; help stakeholders understand there are bumps along the way that are best dealt with working together.

Deliver Content in Beta

The speed will please stakeholders without the pressure of guarantees. If they're happy with you, that's fun. Google does it with apps they roll out to millions.

Show Your Colleagues What You're Working On

BI is often very visual so easy to explain, your colleagues will enjoy the fact they've understood it, learnt something and that you've thought them a worthy audience, which is fun. The majority of the time they'll give you useful feedback just by them having a different perspective.

Written by:  Angus Menter, BI Project Manager, DSCallards

For more information, visit www.dscallards.com.