How to find business benefits in SAP BW

At the start of any BW project, be it new or a rollover or an addition of InfoProviders it seems a lot of companies, big and small, old and new, the most important task is to review deliverables with business owners and users. The second most important thing is for business owners and users to understand what they are being.

Business Case: I was appointed Project manager for a Post go live BW implementation in which a large company, that had been with BW for the last 4 years and a team of 13 BW consultants took the decision to let the new business unit heads and steering committee take care of their BW implementation. The partner convinced the Steering committee that they had enough industry experience to know exactly what the customer needed and that they were going to delivery leading edge metrics whereby the company would be able to measure their performance in ways never done before. Also in order to meet the daily reports they would delivery over six hundred queries that would meet the needs of any large global company.
I find it funny to mention that the company's 1st BW go-live had not been a total success too and their second one had taken a similar direction. To cut the story short Go-Live was planned to be simultaneous to the ECC 6 go live in PP. Out of the six hundred reports our audit clarified that users could only use 28 reports As-Is, 68 reports needed considerable rearchitecture and the rest were useless. Of the metrics delivered none were usable from day one. The company spent the next 6 months with an additional team of 7 resources and did not get very far once gain.

First things first - Basic Business Strategy
One of the critical lessons learned, and the company put the project aside as a lesson learned experience, is that executive sponsor was for budget and time purposes only. Business had been totally kept out of the whole BW implementation process as all key users were fully occupied with the ECC processes and tasks. Thus in order to meet BW needs the company hired an external business manager, from their vendor, who led the project deliverables and decided what was, and what was not, good for the BW deliverables. What they ended with is mostly business content and generic metrics that came straight out of the vendor valuts. It was also found that 86 of the reports were operational reports that were more efficiently delivered directly from existing reports in the ECC system and never needed to be deployed from the BW.

One of the Business Owners even went as far as to ask the question "..can we sue the Vendor.." and we all knew that the vendor had all deliverables covered in their small print and business had signed off to most of the deliverables - as that was part of the standard cutover checks and handover requirement.

So how do we ensure Business Value

1. Business must become an integral part of every BW project
2. Business must participate, own, design and define what they need and do not need
3. Where they are unsure, a Value Architect must be hired to assist them make the right decisions
4. The value architect must not belong to the triad - SW, HW or Vendor partners.
5. There must be constant Business value checks all along the project process
6. A details process must be put into place to clearly define what report comes from which system.
7. Day-to-day reporting needs must be met first
8. All metrics, dashboards and scorecards must be a subsequent event after primary business needs have been met.
9. Architecture and Modeling are key but standards are imperative - part of BI Strategy and best practice documentation

In other words when we fail to plan for business = Plan to fail for business.

Data warehouses were supposed to eliminate a lot of data and replace it with a lot of information, but it seems we are still generating more and more data and sometimes not all the information that business expected to get out of their BW investments.