Planning & Building Cubes: Tasks, Deliverables, Participants, & Schedules

The following list of tasks, deliverables, participants, and schedules are just templates or guidelines of what our team had to go through in order to deliver new business critical cubes or adding new dimensions to business critical cubes.  These cubes where 500 Gb to 1Tb in size and came from processing 24Tb of data every day.  Agile methods could work, but only when the Developers are working on our cubes, which was just 4-6 weeks out of the 6 months it takes to roll out our cubes.  I know: wow, but this was how we evolved the phases to protect the business critical cubes from bad data.  The rest of the tasks and deliverables come from non-development sources.  Make of it as you will.   Hope this gives some insight in the efforts in building large business critical cubes verses your average application and reporting development.  Its the difference between building a dog house verses building a sky scraper.  So much more logistics and physics involved.

Green Light Phase:

• Tasks
• Business requirement gathering
• Requirement review
• Feature costing
• Feature stack ranking
• Document sign-offs
• Deliverables
• Business requirement document
• Feature costing spreadsheet
• Participants
• Key business stakeholders
• Product Managers
• Engineering Program Managers
• Development manager/leads
• Test manager/leads
• Operations manager/leads
• Data Quality manager/leads
• Schedule
• 4 weeks

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Planning Phase:

• Tasks
• Roadmap creation & review
• Hardware planning
• Deliverables
• Roadmap
• Hardware acquisition request
• Swag schedule
• Participants
• Key business stakeholders
• Product managers
• Engineering Program Managers
• Development managers/leads
• Test managers/leads
• Operations managers/leads
• DataQuality manager/leads
• Schedule
• 2 weeks

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Design Phase:

• Tasks
• Business interviews
• Use case scenarios
• Dimensional modeling
• Volume analysis
• Hardware configuration
• Document review & sign-offs
• Deliverables
• Data contracts
• Functional specs
• Service Level Agreement (SLA) Document
• Technical specs
• Test specs
• Participants
• Product Managers
• Engineering Program Managers
• Develoment leads
• Test leads
• Operation leads
• DataQuality leads
• Schedule
• 4 weeks

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 Building Phase:

• Tasks
• Development
• Cube Engineering Team Deliverables
• Dimension Storehouse
• Managed dimensions
• Static dimensions
• Datamart ETL
• DataMart DB
• Cube
• Baseline agg indexes
• Monitoring & instrumentation
• Reports
• Deployment document
• Release to Operations (RTO) package
• Trouble shooting guide
• ETL Pipeline Team Deliverables
• Aggregated Data streams
• Auto discovered dimensions files
• Participants
• Product managers
• Engineering Program Managers
• Developers
• Testers
• Operations
• Schedule
• 4-6 weeks

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Testing Phase 

• Tasks
• Testing
• Integration testing
• Cube Team Deliverables
• Deployment document
• Sample managed dimensions
• Troubleshooting guide
• Releast to Operation (RTO) package
• Rollout plan
• ETL Pipeline Team Deliverables
• Sample streams
• Sample auto-discovery files
• Releast to Operation (RTO) Package
• Participants
• Product managers
• Engineering Program Managers
• Testers
• Developers
• DataQuality
• Schedule
• 2-4 weeks

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Release to Operations (RTO) Phase

• Tasks
• Deployment
• Hardware build out
• Historical data load
• Configure monitoring
• Deliverables
• Fully deployed solution
• Participants
• Engineering Program Managers
• Developers
• Testers
• Operations
• Schedule
• 2-4 weeks

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Release to Customer (RTC) Phase

•  Tasks
• Data Quality Certification
• User Acceptance Testing (UAT)
• Customer communications on new release
• Release to Customer (RTC) Sign-off
• Deliverables
• Certification plan & exit criteria
• UAT plan & exit criteria
• RTC Check off list
• Participants
• Key business stakeholders
• Product manager
• Engineering Program Managers
• Developers
• Testers
• Operations
• DataQuality team
• Key users
• Schedule
• 2-4 weeks