BI Project Scoping, with Anne Eisenach

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In this first episode in a series on BI project management, Brick interviews Anne Eisenach, Senior Project Manager, to discuss the first critical steps in a BI project, strategic and tactical scoping. If you get these right, you set yourself up for a smooth BI project, delivering on the desired ROI and goals, and staying in sync with the key stakeholders.

Blue Margin helps private equity owned and mid-market companies organize their data into dashboards to execute on strategy and create a culture of accountability. We call it The Dashboard Effect, the title of our book and podcast. 

 Visit Blue Margin's library of additional BI resources here.

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#projectmanagement #PM #BI #scoping #businessintelligence #reporting #dashboard #datawarehouse

Transcript

Brick Thompson: 0:04

Welcome to the Dashboard Effect Podcast. I'm Brick Thompson and today I've got Anne Eisenach with

Anne Eisenach: 0:10

Hey Brick.

Brick Thompson: 0:11

Hey, how's it going? Anne is one of our project managers, she's actually a Senior Project Manager here at Blue Margin. And today, we're going to start a new series of podcasts, approximately weekly, on project management and how we approach it. And we did one of these earlier about how to run a good BI project, but we realized we should really probably expand this and talk about how we go through it from beginning to end. So this is the first of those. And today, what are we going to be talking about?

Anne Eisenach: 0:42

Thanks for having me. I'm glad to be here.

Brick Thompson: 0:44

Yeah, you bet.

Anne Eisenach: 0:45

So today, we're going to talk about scoping, which is really what we see as the foundational element to setting up a good project for success.

Brick Thompson: 0:52

Okay, so how do you define scoping?

Anne Eisenach: 0:55

So scope, I mean, you can think about it in simplest form, it's really what's the work that we need to do to achieve a project goal. That goal piece is really important. We'll talk a little bit more about that.

Brick Thompson: 1:05

Okay. And so as we were sort of doing notes for this, you said there are basically two key ways... two key parts to the scoping. What are those?

Anne Eisenach: 1:16

Yep. So I want to just say, I think scope is something that you could really easily arrive at. Let's say,"Alright, we're gonna connect to this data source, we're gonna build this report." In theory, that scope, but there's actually a lot more intentionality behind it that we like to put in to make sure that we're setting ourselves and our clients up for a good project and helping them know what to expect. So the two foundational pieces you mentioned here, in my opinion, are the strategic element and also tactical.

Brick Thompson: 1:43

Okay, so strategic alignment with the client is number one. What are the pieces of that? What are the key pieces of that?

Anne Eisenach: 1:51

So we always want to start with the goal, when we're talking to our clients. We can get to a point of scoping a variety of ways. Often we're doing a design project, and that's where we're having discussions around requirements, scope with our clients. And then there are other times where there may be a quick return need. We're having a series of requirements gathering calls in a less formal way than a design project. Either way that we might arrive at the point of,"Okay, we're ready to talk about scoping a project," we start with the goal, or goals for a project. We have to know our destination, in my opinion, the destination is just as important as the journey on this one. That remains central in scoping and throughout project execution. So establishing that here is really important.

Brick Thompson: 2:35

Okay, so when you say goal, you're talking about the business goal, right? Not the, "Oh, our goal is to have a dashboard."

Anne Eisenach: 2:43

Correct.

Brick Thompson: 2:43

But rather, we want to build some ETL tools and reports that will meet this business objective. Is that right?

Anne Eisenach: 2:51

That's right. And even taking it a step further, both in conversation with our clients, and internally, as we're making sure that we have a good sense of the goal, what's the outcome that the client is hoping to achieve? Not just the output. Is it we could say, good visibility into margin? Well, what are you going to be able to do with that? Let's take it one step further. So having those conversations with our clients, and then making sure that we can articulate that well, internally, before we even go any further is also really important.

Brick Thompson: 3:17

Okay. Yeah, one of the ways I try to get at that, because it's really easy for a business person, and I've done this, to say the goal is to get more insight into margin. But then if you ask the next question of, "What are you going to do with that insight? What questions are you going to answer? What decisions are you going to make? What ultimate KPIs for the business are you going to try to change by having that insight?" And that'll help you really understand what the goal is.

Anne Eisenach: 3:47

Exactly.

Brick Thompson: 3:47

And the goal, it's so tempting to think the goal is the deliverable, and describe it that way. But it's not. the goal is the business outcome, and then the deliverable that helps to achieve that business outcome.

Anne Eisenach: 4:00

That's exactly right. And that's exactly how we think about it. When we talk about our next point, tactical scoping, we define goals first, and then move into deliverables and then even take it a step further into activities.

Brick Thompson: 4:11

Okay, well let's stay on strategic. So once you've got the goal, what are the other things that you're thinking about?

Anne Eisenach: 4:20

So I like to make sure that we understand something called the Triple Constraint. I imagine you've heard of that. It's a PMI term, commonly used in project management.

Brick Thompson: 4:31

If you could have any two of these three things.

Unknown: 4:35

Not exactly. So the Triple Constraint really is comprised of three elements that may impact your project, and that is scope, schedule and budget. It's often really focused on executing a project. I think it's actually almost as equally if not more important to really understand that with our clients upfront when we're scoping. The reason for that is, there's always going to be a few different ways that we can approach a project and meet a goal, right? There's going to be a few different ways to get to that ultimate destination. Some are more lightweight, some are more heavyweight, some are more scalable, some are more, you know, "This gets you immediate visibility," and we're going to build upon it.

Brick Thompson: 5:17

So for example, you might say, "Alright, the client has a constraint around budget." And we could we could go, given a certain budget, we could say, "Alright, let's build something that's scalable, so as you grow from 100 million to 2 billion, it gets the whole way with no more changes." But the client may say, "You know what, I don't have the budget to do that now. What I need is to get through the next six months." And so then you size the project for that appropriately,

Unknown: 5:44

Exactly. In that scenario, we'd be pulling the lever of scope, so maybe reducing the amount that we're actually going after.

Brick Thompson: 5:51

And the same thing could happen with schedule. So you may say,"Alright, I want to do... I want all the bells and whistles. And I want to achieve these five goals, but I need to do it in the next 30 days." And we may realize that either on our side capacity, but even more often on the client side, the capacity that's needed to bring the right SMEs to the table, we can't get those five done in 30 days. And so we're going to adjust the scope so that we can meet your schedule constraint.

Unknown: 6:20

Yeah, another scenario with schedule constraints is maybe budget is flexible for them. Maybe they're willing to pay whatever they need to do to get something quickly, quick visibility. In that scenario, we might look at, "Okay, we can apply more resources on this project. We can pull this timeline in from four to two weeks if we add additional team members to run work in parallel." So, there's a lot of different ways that we can work with the scope and approach a project. So that's why it's so important for us to know that upfront and be in step with the client on that.

Brick Thompson: 6:50

Okay, so we start with that business goal, we move to the Triple Constraint puzzle, and figuring that out. I assume at that point we're ready to go into tactical scoping.

Unknown: 7:01

Not quite. The other important element, I've touched on it a little bit is just scoping in partnership with the client. I think this is something that's really important to keep in mind. Our client partnership is so important to the success of our projects. It's really helpful to set that expectation up front and really establish a strong working relationship with the clients. We're going to be working with them day in and day out on every week get to meet the goal. So their success is our success and vice versa. And so establishing that partnership in the scoping process is important. A little bit more about that is making it more of a conversation, rather than a one sided, "Here's what you need to do, and it's going to cost this." Nobody really wants to hear that. I don't think. In my experience, when we involve them and give them a little bit of the opportunity to control their own destiny, so to speak, there's a lot more buy-in and our path that we've set forth together to achieve is established together right there.

Brick Thompson: 8:04

Well, we're in sync then. We have clear understanding of what needs to happen from both sides. And you know, it's not necessarily the case that the client has to spend lots of time. But there are specific periods during the project where they've got to be available. Up front, there's definitely some discovery and business rules, defining and that type of thing. But even all along the way we do well, we'll talk about this as we get further into this series, but we do a lot of checkpoints, to make sure everything's going well.

Anne Eisenach: 8:35

That partnership is essential to all of our success. And so what that looks like, of course, we're still going to be making the recommendations, right. But it's giving them the opportunity to have inputs about, "Okay, that may not meet my timeline needs, okay, that may not meet my budget needs." Helping them kind of help us pull those levers as we're doing scoping so that we're feeling really comfortable and confident in the project before we get started.

Brick Thompson: 9:00

Okay, good. All right. So, can you give me an example of where strategic alignment, the strategic alignment portion of the scoping didn't go well, and lessons learned for us.

Anne Eisenach: 9:12

You bet. Always willing to explore a scenario where that we learned from. So we were doing a design phase with a client, we felt like we had good alignment on their goals. We were exploring three different data sources to help them achieve those goals, a couple of different Power BI reports, we were really assuming that they wanted the most scalable, sustainable, stable technical solution possible.

Brick Thompson: 9:36

Avoiding technical debt, and it's going to scale into years in the future.

Anne Eisenach: 9:40

You bet, exactly. We didn't have intentional conversations with them or, kind of, checkpoints along the way within that design phase.

Brick Thompson: 9:46

So we weren't in sync on that goal. It was just an assumption on our part.

Anne Eisenach: 9:50

Yeah, we had the goal, but we didn't have the context around that goal in the the Triple Constraint component that I talked about. And so we got to the end of the design phase, we gave them a proposal, we said, "we're going to do this, this, and this." It was a pretty healthy price point, you

Brick Thompson: 10:03

Sure, yeah, you sort of brought out the know?

Anne Eisenach: 10:05

Exactly, you brought out the Cadillac. We Cadillac. wanted to get them what we felt was best. From a technical perspective, that's important. And they, you know, their reactions were not sticker shock, per se, but they actually kind of retreated. And they said, "Okay, let us think about it." There was just a lot of uncertainty at the end of that proposal. A week went by, we had a hard time really getting any answer or response from them. Ultimately, what we learned was, it just wasn't, it wasn't within their budget. It wasn't within their budget, and... they didn't see the ROI in spending that amount of money on this specific project.

Brick Thompson: 10:42

So, if we had understood that constraint, the budget constraint up front, our scoping would have been different, and we may have actually been in sync. So how would you do how how do you approach it now, so you don't Yeah.

Anne Eisenach: 10:55

You bet. I had an opportunity to to change that a Turns out it wasn't. She said, this was our have that happen. CFO, and she said, "You know, I'm thinking about this in terms couple of weeks later. We were working with a client in a design phase, and we kind of found ourselves, "Alright, there's two paths we could take. We could go the Cadillac route, we could go the Dodge." I'm from a Dodge family, I got to get in there. And, you know, we said,"Alright, why don't we learn from our previous experience? Why don't we say, let's bring of good, better, best," was the analogy that she chose. And she in, you know, our main project sponsor, and just kind of do a said, "I know what you're recommending to me right now is best, and I know that that's what we ultimately want to get to. But right now, based on my timeline needs," because this checkpoint with them one week into this project, and say, was gonna give her a huge amounts of ROI, just personally in a reduction of her effort to create these reports, and great'Here's where we're starting to trend on price of this project. visibility into the margin that she was looking to see. So she said, "In this scenario, I actually don't need best, I just You know, there's a few options. The best technical need better. So, is there something that you can do that will still meet those goals and get it to me sooner, and at a recommendation here is going to put you at this point. Is that lower price point?"

Brick Thompson: 12:18

Almost always.

Anne Eisenach: 12:19

Yeah, and we said, "Absolutely." This was so helpful to have this conversation. It was going to work for you? Is that in alignment with your illuminating for us, and we took that back. We were able to propose something a little bit more middle of the road, and within several days had agreement and alignment on the expectations of budget for this project?'" scope. And we move forward with that project and it went really well.

Brick Thompson: 12:36

It's still tricky though, because, you know, it's tempting to say,"Okay, so always just do the budget version." But then you may miss on the other constraints, like, "Okay, it's gonna take three months, and you need it and two," or, "We... are going to have technical debt." And you need to just be in sync on all of those things.

Anne Eisenach: 12:55

That's right.

Brick Thompson: 12:56

Okay, good. All right, anything else on strategic alignment?

Anne Eisenach: 13:00

No, I think that's all I want to cover.

Brick Thompson: 13:01

Alright, let's move to tactical, tactical scoping. So what is tactical scoping as opposed to strategic?

Anne Eisenach: 13:08

You bet. So tactical scoping, in my mind is, how do we actually put pen to paper, so to speak, and get to our list of activities, our timeline and our proposed staffing plan for the project. And so, again, we still start with the goal, we sit down with the team that's been working on the project, it's usually a technical resource, usually a member of our consulting team, and a project manager kind of leading through this scoping process. We start with the goal, in addition to the context that we've learned around their Triple Constraint, and then we say, "Alright, let's make sure that we're aligned on what they're hoping to achieve, and then let's chart our course for getting there." So we go through the goal, and like I said, we do kind of push the team to make sure that, "Alright, it's not just building the report, it's not the deliverable. What is the outcome that we're going to help this client achieved through this project?"

Brick Thompson: 13:55

So you, you make sure the engineers are connected to that business goal, not the, not the deliverables. Ultimately, they're going to deliver the deliverables. But you need to make sure the whole project team on the Blue Margin side is attached to that business goal.

Anne Eisenach: 14:09

That's right.

Brick Thompson: 14:10

Okay, so I just want to clarify one thing, which is that tactical scoping, the tactical scoping process, that's an internal Blue Margin project team thing that we're doing. We've done strategic alignment with the client, that's the first part of the scoping. Then when we've gotten the green light, then we bring it to the internal team, make sure that all of the team, including the engineers are aligned on the strategic business goals, not the deliverable goals and then start to get down to, "Okay, how do we tactically get this done? And what are those deliverables going to be to meet that goal?, that type of thing." Is that right?

Anne Eisenach: 14:44

Thats right. So we start with the goal and sure that everybody on the team is attached to that, and then we actually move right into deliverables. Okay, so what are the actual what are the outputs that they're gonna get helping them achieve that goal? We'll define our deliverables and then we'll take it just one step further than that into something that we call our high level activities. So what's the work that actually needs to get done to achieve those deliverables, and we keep it relatively, I say high level, we keep it relatively lightweight at this stage, we want to make sure that we're getting to a point in the scope where we can give the client something to react to where we can have that we can facilitate that conversation about, okay, there's multiple ways that we can approach this at multiple different timeframes, price points, you know, we may do kind of multiple iterations of this tactical scoping process based on the discussions that we're having on the strategic front.

Brick Thompson: 15:35

Okay, so those are going out at the same time?

Anne Eisenach: 15:37

They're roughly in parallel.

Brick Thompson: 15:39

All right, because the strategic alignment has to happen before you can really start the tactical, but then they're sort of playing off of each other to get to your

Anne Eisenach: 15:49

Thats right. It can be an iterative approach. final skills. There are times where we just... do scoping once. Were right there.

Brick Thompson: 15:55

At what percent of the time is it that?

Anne Eisenach: 15:57

I would say... you're putting me on the spot, I don't know. It might be 50/50. I would say there's times we probably go through and we make some small adjustments, at least Usually some iteration? once. Yeah, I think there is.

Brick Thompson: 16:09

Okay, so now you're getting the deliverables, you get high level activities. What else?

Anne Eisenach: 16:15

Something else that we like to define at this stage is what we call scope exclusions and scope assumptions where it makes sense. So I want to make sure to call out we are flexible, right, we can be flexible as to how we're getting to our end destination. There has a level of flexibility. But scoping and calling out these exclusions and assumptions enables us to really kind of set boundaries around that. So it gives us a good framework for what we can and can't do within the scope of a specific project. So we'll call out exclusions, where there's specifically been something that a client have said, "We're not sure that we can get to that data yet." We'll make sure that we call that out specifically, just to be clear. Okay, that's something that we flagged that we'll get to potentially in phase two, just based on data limitations. Other times it's Row Level Security, maybe there's something they have ambitions down the road to roll this out to additional users. And they may need to tighten the security at that point. A lot of times that may not be around one necessity. And so just calling out specific things like that, that could really impact scope is important at this stage. And it also helps us make sure that we're on the same page with the client to what they are getting and what they aren't getting.

Brick Thompson: 17:26

Yeah, exactly. Staying in scope. No surprises. Exactly. Yeah, great. Because you don't want to have mismatched assumptions, and deal with that sort of three quarters of the way into a project.

Anne Eisenach: 17:38

Exactly. So that helps us establish, again, kind of our boundaries there. And then the last step and tactical really at this stage is we'll we'll work through the sequence and timeline. And so this is where again, we'll pull in kind of that Triple Constraint. If we know that we need to focus on timeline, that's the most important we've got a non negotiable, hard deadline, we've got to show this at a board meeting later this month. Okay, we're gonna look at pulling in resources, where does it make sense to run, maybe we'll put two data architects, maybe there's two sources, and we can actually run those directly in parallel, and get to a point where we can start reporting as soon as possible. So really just working with, you know, what's the right sequence to get to be most efficient, and to meet their really timeline at that point is what we're looking at.

Brick Thompson: 18:24

Yeah, okay. It's quite a puzzle.

Anne Eisenach: 18:27

It's a puzzle. There's a lot of moving pieces to it.

Brick Thompson: 18:31

All right. And and it's outside the scope of this podcast to talk about, then how do we move that into our project management tools, and how does that go? We'll do that in later ones. But I think we've covered the scoping pretty well. Any any thoughts you want to add before we wrap up?

Anne Eisenach: 18:49

I don't think so. I think this covered it. Really just scoping, it is the foundational piece, establishing that partnership with the client early on, and making sure that we're in alignment strategically and tactically is going to set us up for good projects.

Brick Thompson: 19:03

Yeah. Okay. I love it. Thank you. Appreciate you coming in. I look forward to the next one. Thats right. Thanks for having me on. All right, you bet.