Qlik Summer School Webinar Series - Qlik Project Management Methodology

The second webinar of the "Buoyant Best Practices" week was given by Helen Davey, Qlik Global Project Manager. In this session, she explained the Qlik Project Management (QPM) methodology followed by Qlik, the key areas they focus on, and what are the phases that make up a project.

According to Helen, Project Management focus on two key areas:

• Experienced Project Managers: With knowledge in Qlik products, and responsible of  leverage best practices 
• Proven Methodology: The use of proven methodology, leverage knowledge and experience set objectives for today and future.

Investing in Project management, increases the chances of achieving results, ensures efficient and best value use of resources from both sides Qlik and customers, and satisfies the needs of different stakeholders. Also, one critical factor for success is empower users to be part of the implementation, on Helen own words "the faster we can empower customer's employees to conduct analysis and collaborate more on solutions and prove the decision making in the organization the more the customer will benefit." So based on this they work in partnership with anybody relevant and involved with the implementation on both business and Qlik side.

To maximize Qlik implementations, Project Managers work closely with business users and IT to gather requirements, design, develop, test, and implement solutions to keep implementations on target. Also, they ensure that projects meet the objectives by controlling budget, managing risks and issues. Finally, they also promote high quality products by taking care of testing in different areas such as security, performance, and scalability.

QPM Phases

This methodology involves three key phases discovery, execution, deployment

Discovery

Helen said that "The start of the project is critical to have everything in the right place." One of the key tasks during the discovery phase is the business discovery workshop, but before it's important to identify the stakeholders on both sides Qlik and business, and define a high level scope and plan.

Once the discovery workshop is done, it's important to document the output and review it with the customer. Next, elaborate a more detailed project plan that allocates budget, time an resources, during the execution of this task is critical that stakeholders understand dependencies. Also, it's highly important to set a communication plan that will be used to define the frequency of reporting project progress, and issues. 

Last but not least, risk management should start during the discovery phase. Risk management focus on identifying possible risks and how much they could affect the project, elaborate mitigation plans to prevent these risks from occurring,and define how them will be monitored and controlled (regular assessments, documentation, KPI definition)

Execution

This phase concentrates on building the requirement. Agile development can be applied to deliver visualizations in planned sprints. The amount and size of sprints will depend on the requirements. Once a sprint has been completed,  a sprint review meeting with customer must be held to get feedback. If the customer agrees with current delivery, then it's time to move to the next sprint, and develop the next set of requirements. Once all the sprints have been completed, it's important to test complete functionality, security, performance, and scalability.

Deployment

Finally, once we have completed the development, and passed the testing, it's time to rollout into production. Additional tasks to be done during the deployment phase are documentation delivery, trainings, handover to support team, get the project sign-off and document the lessons learned and best practices.