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With so many teams “going agile,” it’s important for your BI team to keep a few things in mind that will help your agile transformation go more smoothly. This series, “10 Mistakes to Avoid In an Agile BI Transformation”, will show you how to prevent the most common pitfalls I’ve encountered in my experience as an Agile Coach.
Many BI teams have infrastructures designed years ago when all projects followed a predictable, slow set of steps from inception through delivery. BI teams wanting to work in an agile approach will often find their existing infrastructures are not conducive to rapid, evolutionary progress on small pieces of value. Although you don’t have to completely replace your infrastructure before you start your agile transformation, you should identify key areas for improvement and include them in your team backlog to tackle alongside customer deliverables.
Where to start? One option is to learn from software teams in your organization who have improved their infrastructure to support agility. Find out how they did it and what tools they use. Explore whether those approaches could work for your BI environment.
Another option is to do some time-boxed experiments (often called spikes in agile) to challenge your team and discover your capabilities around automated builds, code version control, and test automation.
At the very least, start writing repeatable tests and identifying test data sets so you can be ready for automation when you next have a chance to embrace it!
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