Many business users are raising complaints about reporting and analytics that took a lot of time to develop with the IT team. One research found that traditional BI is unable to provide quick reporting and solutions to industries in this competitive world. Companies are spending a lot of time and money for modeling data and when it appears that models have evolved the approach changes. So, it is juggling to do it again and the problem is too long to find a solution.
Seeing the difficulty of distributing BI applications to managers and executives that they are unable to make the right decisions; it has become imperative that an alternative development approach is needed to adopt. In fact, there is a widespread and growing consensus that the time for Agile BI has arrived.
What are Agile analytics and BI?
Agile Analytics, or Agile Business Intelligence, is a term used to describe the use of software methodology, also known by the term "agile development" for use in analytics or BI projects. Agile BI Project helps in improving the competence, functionality, flexibility, usability in updating the business requirements of the project in any time frame.
Agile BI is a recurring process and requires continuous development of reports, online data visualization, dashboards, and new functionality to optimize current processes and develop new ones. By adopting agile development, BI projects break down into many smaller projects, but this goal is set for small businesses and large businesses to help companies adapt to business goals and ever-changing market conditions.
Benefits of using Agile Business Intelligence
Agile methods grew out of real-life project experiences. The agile method is becoming more successful when applied to BI reporting and analytics. It is no surprise that using Agile for BI reporting and analytics has been so popular over the past several years. Below we have mentioned some of the benefits of using agile methodology approaches.
Easy to deliver:
Agile BI helps to deliver products within a short period of time and using different iterations. Each iteration consists of independent software that is deployed for production. Agile BI focuses on the separation of projects and is driven by the business-defined scope and value. Project timelines are tracked in small units with customers paying for a specified amount of time.
Project transparency:
By involving business users with the project team, they have a better understanding of how the development process works and generally take more ownership of the solution. This helps sponsors get a realistic perspective of where the project stands so that they can quickly address risks, challenges, and issues.
Sharing and collaboration:
Sharing and collaboration is a feature in Agile B that helps both business users and the development team. Here we can provide an opportunity to train business users with business intelligence tools during the project. As more interaction with the team with business users they can build their skills in business intelligence tools and they can then harness the full capabilities of the tool.
High return on investment:
Organizations using agile business intelligence achieve increased rate-of-return (ROI) due to shorter development cycles. Agile BI reduces the number of IT resources and time devoted to delivering results to customers. Customers and other users achieve satisfaction due to the continuous delivery of usable software.
Decision-making resources:
Agile business intelligence tools are powerful additions to the decision-making resources of small and medium-sized companies. The use of BI resources at the initial level is not very high, it also comes with low maintenance costs and they provide maximum value by helping users find important information to make accurate decisions.
What is the success factor behind using agile business intelligence?
The success of agile business intelligence includes 3 key aspects:
Skilled and trained team:
One of the biggest success factors for the completion of any agile BI project is the involvement of a trained cohesive project team and collaborative work. Daily collaboration helps the team to recover a mix of skills and personality needs to be addressed early in the process.
Business role and trust:
It is difficult to gain any business's trust, but if we are able to gain their trust, then any business users can easily work with the company. From the business side, it is imperative to have someone with professional knowledge and authority to help navigate the daily challenges that arise on any BI project. The business user must be able to perform roles and responsibilities for reporting power users and undergo training after the completion of the project.
Agile leadership:
A talented scrum master is essential to the success of an Agile business intelligence project. The scrum Master will manage the project scope and ensure that enough time is allocated to prioritize tasks and creep scope.
What are the problems with traditional waterfall methods?
The waterfall approach has been used for a long time used in the system for the development of life-cycle to create a network. This system is called waterfall because each step is depending on others in a downward approach. Each model is subdivided into different phases and every end step becomes the beginning of the next phase. Every event has to be accomplished before the next starts, and there is no coinciding with the phases.
The problem that arises in the waterfall method is:
- The model does not accommodate changes
- Necessary to complete the steps before moving to the next step
- Downgrading of system audit at the last phase of development
- Difficult to justify the required cost and resources
Necessary steps for Agile BI and Analytics Development
From the above discussion, it is clear that Agile BI development is a successful approach to project development. Here we introduce some more tips that make this statement clearer.
Business user involvement:
The involvement of business users is difficult at every stage of the development of a BI project. But agile BI made it possible. In agile, business users and product owners experience team progress at regular intervals throughout the process, and increased business user input means better overall business value. Typically, you need to collaborate with business users to update the solution based on user feedback and they want to be involved in the project. When handling business users, remember that they must be flexible and value them. By following the approach, you can save a lot of time and ultimately deliver quality products.
Change in the process:
Change in the requirement in the middle of the project is a major headache for the BI team. And if they are not developed as per the requirement then results in a competitive advantage. The introduction of agile BI makes it possible to update the requirements at any level of BI product development.
Choose the right BI software:
Agile BI methods help in choosing the right BI tool or software for specific projects. However, in traditional approaches, iterations will take longer if your device is cumbersome, difficult to use, or does not work together with other systems and data sources. Whereas modern agile BI has overcome all these issues.
Automate process
Automated processes are playing a major role in making the agile BI method successful. Building automation will help in preproduction environments where you need to build a version of your system that works perfectly. Agile analytical tools can help teams automate any process that has been performed more than once.
Quality production:
By Agile BI Development, IT team members are able to deliver quality products to the business. Testing is required to deliver a quality product and when customers or business users are satisfied with the product it is a respectable task of the team members. Each facility will have to be time tested and debugged to ensure product quality and to be delivered in the end when the final product is ready.
Support collaborative feature:
Agile BI implementation in the project helps business users share information and their understanding with team members for successfully delivering the project. Collaborating daily with the technical team is important as well as collaborating throughout the project community in order to become successful in agile. Traditionally it was quite complicated because the development team has a burden of keeping deadlines, budgets released, quality in mind, etc.
Conclusion
Today business managers demand to analyze a report in every phase of business work for making a good decision. So, a more flexible approach for BI report development is essential. Thoughtful implementation of Agile Business Intelligence can significantly enhance the velocity of a BI project team. You can start using EzDataMunch to implement agile business intelligence for your business for free for life and gain the benefits of Agile BI for your organization.