That is more inline with what I see & hear from customers and businesses. I highlighted a story in the same online publication, SearchBusinessAnalytics.com, last month that said there was a LACK of interest. See it here. That was tweeted from my Twitter account here.

BTW, if you enjoy playing with and building Mobile BI apps, check out Derek Comingore's piece on mobile BI from our SQL Mag BI Blog series here.

I spent 3 years with Microsoft previously, mainly as a product manager on BI solutions for SQL Server that served all LOB applications and industries.

In my new role with Microsoft, I am going to focus on all areas of database & BI. I am not certain if I am going to keep up the PPM BI blog here at BYE Blogs since my focus will no longer be on the project portfolio management industry.

I think I will wait and see if there is a need to keep writing about this space, if I receive a lot of requests for it, and whether or not I will have the time to devote to this blog going forward.

Thanks for reading!!

Best, Mark Kromer

http://ioug.itconvergence.com/pls/apex/DWBISIG.download_my_file?p_file=2618.

On Wednesday, June 23, we will be holding an online webinar where I will be joined by my colleague Karl Prutzer to dive into details of how we used Oracle's OBIEE to build out a brand-new project portfolio analytics product for Oracle using their business intelligence, dashboards, analytics and data warehouse technologies.

If you would like to join us, registration is free. Just click here. This will be a deep-dive into use of the tools & technologies and not a discussion of the product's value proposition or competitive positioning.

See ya there! Thanks, Mark

It shows examples of BI PPM in OBIEE and with our new P6 Analytics product. It also shows a few examples from Oracle Project Analytics and other BI Apps samples.

Yes, it is very Oracle-centric, but this was the Oracle user group, after all ... However, you may find it useful in terms of best-practices ideas and what a sophisticated analytics portal would look like in your organization.

No matter what vendor you use for project & portfolio management, reporting, analytics and BI, having a single, interactive, easy-to-access and navigate solution for executive sponsors, team members, finance, etc. to gain visibility and transparency into your project and PMO performance and processes is a critical success factor.

Since I blog about BI for PPM here on this Beye Blog, I am obviously thrilled with this annoucement. When you click over at the product details from the above link, you'll see the samples and screenshots from out-of-the-box dashboards that use Oracle's OBIEE product for presentation.

The ETL is pre-built and pre-configured and uses both and ODS as well as a star schema dimensional model. Since we are using only Primavera's P6 data bases as a source, we can exercise greater control and ensure data quality from this model.

I would love to hear your comments and feedback!

Thanks, Mark

Strangely, it focused almost solely on using Microsoft products for affordable BI, particularly focusing on Excel & PowerPivot.

What was missing? Any mention of open-source solutions.

So, for those of you who want a truly enterprise-ready BI solution that goes beyond spreadsheets, take a look at these 2 top-notch open-source BI vendors which is a great way to reap the benefits of enterprise BI, data warehouses, business analytics and predictive analytics without breaking the bank: Jaspersoft & Pentaho.

I spent a few hours last week speaking with both Oracle & Microsoft ETL PMs about one my favorite topics in the BIDW world, metadata-driven ETL.

What is metadata-driven ETL? IMO, it is ETL that can be derived partially automatically from an analysis of source & target, preconfigured transformations and historical metadata. The intent is to make ETL generation quicker, easier and more flexible. How often do you find ETL routines that break because something changed on a source?

I found a very nice description of metadata driven ETL here on this blog from Aditi. If you are interested in metdata driven ETL, I highly recommend reading it.

It is nice to see that Microsoft has set-up a council to maintain CodePlex which is where you can find a metadata driven ETL framework for SSIS that I used and participated in when I was a PM @ Microsoft called MDDE. It is on CodePlex and maintained by a former colleague of mine, David Reed. It is a pretty decent (still several shortcomings) framework for metadata driven ETL for SQL Server.

I had written quite a bit about the business value of visualizing business intelligence, trends, history and scorecards in a compelling way with MSDN here. If you search on the blog, you can see my examples of using Silverlight for BI dashboards to provide a more interactive and exciting experience for decision-makers. I also put an example of using Tufte's Sparklines in Excel. Let us all not forget the power of using Excel for uncovering business data trends and for making excellent decisions!

And I want to come back to this as I am completing work on a project that is wrapping up where we are releasing a new earned value and project performance pre-built BI application for Oracle's Primavera product line.

Let me give you an example of 2 of my favorite BI visualization packages below. First is Crystal Xcelsius as used by solverUSA and second is Tableau.

Yes these are very busy and dog & pony-show style for the dashboard UI vendors. But what I particularly find appealing about Tableau is that they remain an ISV in the BI space where Outlooksoft, Proclarity, Applix, etc. got scarfed up, they keep on cruising and are very easy to use.

And then Crystal has done a very nice job of capturing the idea of easy-on-the-eyes compelling visualizations while also making it easy to consume, particularly with their inclusion of knobs & dials to tweak values in a what-if simulation environment.

Alright, so that all being said and introduced, let me sum things thing up with a quick list of 3 high-level aspirations that your BI solutions should ensure is baked into your UI, regardless of who or what you use for your visualization:

1. All reports have actions associated: drill-thru, drill-down, drill-up, jump to URL, etc.

2. All dashboard pages have 1 or more filters that control the perspectives & slicers for all reports on the page.

3. Real-time simulations should be included on dashboards for user interaction and what-if scenario planning.

Now let's start a high-level look at measuring KPIs and performance of software development teams that practice Agile development methodologies.

This blog is BI PPM and project managers play an important role on agile software development project as well. It is a slightly different role and there is a big difference in terms of requirements analysis & validation, up-front planning and progressive schedule elaboration.

So, naturally, KPIs that you will use in your scorecards to measure Agile teams will be different. Here I will focus on looking at team & project performance based on their primary work increments called iterations. These are also not meant to get into the weeds of classic software engineering KPIs measured by a development manager or Scrum Master such as bugs or defects and we won't consider an Agile project manager as someone to track a burndown log.

1. Velocity: Based on estimations, this will tell you how much the team will be able to deliver per iteration (typically 30 days). After the first couple of Sprints, you will be able to use that history to improve your benchmarks.

2. Number of Iterations to Complete: I think of this as a sort of ETC for Agile projects, based on time instead of cost. Use the total size of the product backlog and put that over the velocity to determine how many iterations are remaining to complete the project.

3. Number of backlog items validated: Use this to help align the progress of the project to the strategic objectives (aka portfolio KPIs) to ensure that the team is satisfying the commited backlog items and not sneaking in too much skunkworks. This will help you to make a case should you need to do the unthinkable: recommend a Sprint cancelation.

Agile101 makes some good points that measuring remaining scope and time to complete (velocity) misses out on the areas that EVM covers such as impact to costs and this also focuses solely on the team's ability to deliver against the clock, not quality.

Here are 2 very good sources for more reading on Agile project management and measuring performance on Agile projects:

From VersionOne and ccpace.

Last I checked, they have about 40 employees and just US $5M in revenue.

But Forrester ranked them as a leader, like SAS, they leverage PhDs in Mathematics and they have a business model that I have always liked and watched from afar in that they work with software vendors and SIs to embed their technology.

Instead of the SAS large implementation model where you have to hire PhDs to use the software, KXEN allows you to put predictions and data mining in your application, hiding the implementation details.

OK, that's it. I just wanted to say something nice about the little company that sounds like a radio station.

Back to Project Portfolio Management BI next time ... Best, Mark

For example, utility companies do a very good job of assessing and calculating risk around potential project risks and issues. Engineering & construction "owners", or those that hire contractors to build buildings, do a decent job of capital planning and assessing risks in investments and capital budgets.

But in IT project management, where I focus, risk analysis and management of risk tends to be undervalued.

Now these are, of course, generalizations. But I wanted to point this out to speak very briefly about a concept known as EMV or estimated monetary value for risk analysis. It is a good & easy way to use the risks that you've identify in your project and to use a simple formula to place a $$ value on that risk. You can then plot the probability of the impact of those risks as I'll show below.

There is a better detailing of EMV for risk analysis here.

A summary of the steps is: Assign a probability of occurrence for each risk. Then assign a monetary value for the impact of the risk if it were to occur. Finally, multiply the probability by the impact and you get the EMV. This value is positive for opportunities and negative for threats.

You can graph this as a risk chart, a tornado graph or as a distribution of probable values as I've linked to below from Oracle's Risk Management and Hyperion's Crystal Ball. The advantages of using BI tools like these for EMV is that you can get decent analysis through Monte Carlo simulations against your project schedule or your investment schedules based on the number of sample iterations you set. I also have a sample from RiskyProject below of a risk matrix where you can plot your values in 4 quadrant from least to most likely & impactful.

Here is an example of a simple decision tree by Tom Mochal @ TechRepublic where risk implications are mapped out with a decision tree based on expected monetary value:

Another common use of decision trees is making decisions on projects in portfolios that will take into account a number of different attributes including ROI, costs, resources, risk score, strategic alignment, etc.

For simple modeling, drawing a decision tree in a tool such as PowerPoint, Word or Visio works just fine. I find it very useful to decompose a problem and to gain visible, graphic insights to be used for analyzing a problem before making a decision.

However, for more complex modeling, you may require a tool to consolidate different data sources and to build models based on complex rules & algorithms.

Now, I don't wish to offer my personal recommendation on which vendor to utilize to feed attributes and criteria to derive, model and analyze decision trees from your project portfolios. Instead, what I'd like to do is give you links to look into 3 data mining vendors that I've used for this purpose in the past:

Microsoft, in my experience and opinion, is one the simplest and easiest to use in terms of data mining algorithms such as decision trees. The trade-off of simplicity vs. complexity is that you may run into limitations with SQL Server and Excel based data mining. But if your intent is to use just a simple decision tree algorithm and do not require customization or extensive algorithms, then Microsoft is a good fit.

Oracle has both a native data mining engine in the database as well as prebuilt analytics in their enterpise performance management tool, Hyperion. Use the data mining engine if you wanna open the hood and get greasy or use Hyperion if you wanna take advantage of prebuilt attributes and algorithms. The problem with Hyperion is that is does not yet have a solid prebuilt set of project portfolio solutions, so you would probably have to use the financial analysis applications to fit your PPM data into that model.

SAS is generally considered the big daddy of data mining and predictive analytics. My experience is that total cost of ownership increases with a SAS based solution because of the licensing & support costs as well as the skill & talent levels needed to build models in SAS for activities such as decision trees. But the benefit is that you have the best-in-class data mining tool set and limitless possibilities.

Here is an example from MS-Project ... note the semi-sideways "S" shape of the curve:

But why limit s-curves to just costs and earned value metrics over time? Can't we also plot, say, project issues or resource capacity over time and forecasted into the future?

Of course, with analytical engines that can take trends and provide forecasts based on techniques like Monte Carlo, linear regression, etc.

But don't look to and EVMS solution here. To create similar curves over time for KPIs other than CPI or SPI, use data mining and data analytics in Oracle, Microsoft or SAS for that.