Chris Grenz

I often am asked by clients to evaluate the configuration of a BI delivery team and point out any changes that seem prudent.  Usually this is pretty straightforward, but over the years there’s some not-so-obvious roles I’ve come across that would make the cut on my dream team. So, without duplicating the many, many “roles […]

Effective communication by BI teams creates better relationships with business users regardless of the development methodology employed.  Providing: a clear picture of the team’s service offerings before the project, project insight during the project, and ongoing visibility after the project are the triad of effective BI communication and are nearly always a significant part of […]

EzAPI is a set of tools for programmatically manipulating your SSIS packages.  This makes creating those dynamic, metadata driven packages a walk in the park. Or maybe the foothills.  Check it out on Matt Masson’s blog here.  Now for 2012!

I’m always striving to lower the wall between design and implementation.  In BI, this means taking as much of the data architect and business analyst’s work and applying it directly to the data management process (without the developer or administrator middlemen).  Here’s some opportunities: Model builds – Your modeling tool should be able to produce […]

During work on our in-house lightweight metadata repository (MDR), I’ve started to use DBFit for database acceptance testing and have been pleasantly surprised at the simplicity of the tool and its ability to deliver on its promise of low entry cost testing. DBFit is a part of FitNesse, itself an implementation of the FIT acceptance […]

My project teams designate a project root via environment variable and then build a defined directory structure beneath.  This allows each developer to build their environments wherever it suits their needs and desires while providing a consistent path for project paths:   C:\ Users chris.grenz projects <- The projects root defined in PROJECTS_ROOT BI TEST_123 […]

In my previous post on iterative BI I talked about the need to adapt your BI systems to the storm of change that iterative development thrives on.  The first thing on my mind in light of this coming storm is taking control of how my teams package and build their environments. For most of my […]

Data entry isn’t something most would put on a list of BI tools.  But here’s my thought: I have yet to see a BI system of any size that doesn’t have some need for data entry of some kind, whether maintaining a small reference table or pulling the system’s configuration levers or correcting erroneous inbound […]

Recently I was in a conversation where a PM declared “Agile’s just waterfall really fast – we can do that no problem!”  Uh oh. Like (most) everything, delivery methodologies are subject to fashion and trend, and Agile/Scrum/Kanban and the like are en vouge.  Collective, I’ll refer to these highly cyclic methodologies as “iterative” or (little […]

I spend a lot of time working with BI teams assessing how they’re doing and what they should do next.  We often use a BI maturity model as a framework for these assessments.  They’re great accelerators and help the teams to understand where they fall between “getting started” and “guru”, but they’re not great (by […]

Way back at my first full time job, maintaining the system automation program was one of my primary duties.  It was written in C, could launch one thing at a time, and documented dependencies in a cryptic text format.  And I loved it because the alternates were way worse. Fast forward to today where system […]

Automate everything!  The mantra of the real developer – I’d rather spend 2 hours automating a task than 30 minutes of repetitive typing!  Continuous integration finally legitimizes that innate desire to automate during the development process. Continuous Integration (CI) tools automate the application build process and automated tests on a regular interval (or on demand […]