ABSi follows the industry best practices and methodologies of recognized industry leaders. Our method starts with a top down DW/BI roadmap - a ten thousand foot view of how the envisioned IT would align with business goals. This roadmap serves as part of a broadly defined concept of operations (CONOPS) for the Data Warehouse environment and Business intelligence applications, and is presented to the customer’s senior management at a project’s outset. Its purpose is to assure total agreement on the goals, priorities and technical approach of the project. In addition, the CONOPS assures all that ABSi has a good understanding of the business and IT context within which the data warehouse and BI applications will operate.
 

The next phase is in Requirements Analysis, which culminates in a detailed system requirements specification. Downstream system testing will map back to these specified requirements. Depending on customer preferences, this phase could also include a proof of concept prototype or even multiple prototypes. The third phase, design, delivers two major artifacts: a preliminary and a final design specification document along with accompanying design reviews. Often, these documents are preceded by other artifacts (e.g., technical interchange meeting minutes, an “issues tracker” document, preliminary and detailed data models, requirements review).

Another technique we prefer is to establish a joint database working group with our customer’s internal IT organization, consisting of database analysts, designers and developers along with customer representatives knowledgeable with the business meanings and technical aspects of the source data as well as the operational environment of the application. A major goal of this type of working group is the assurance of a sound data model to hand off to the software developers and an identification of the issues of operating the database when it reaches a production stage.

The next phase, software development, results in production-ready software increments for cutover to production. Included is unit level and developer integration testing. During this phase the project team also constructs operations and user manuals, and coordinates with customer operations and user training groups on system roll-out as well as with system testers for acceptance testing.

During the next phase, acceptance testing support, the project team supports customer acceptance testing and resolves defects found during this testing. In the final phase, the team coordinates with the operations group to cutover the system into production.