Phase 3 - Information Management Roadmap and Foundation Activities

From MIKE2 Methodology

There are 2 major aspects to Phase 3, the Roadmap and Foundation Activities. Together, these 2 workstreams provide a complementary approach for refining scope and removing key project risk areas for the software delivery aspects of the project.

Overview

The Roadmap provides the detailed requirements and solution definition that applies to the 3 stages of continuous implementation. In this phase, the business systems requirements developed in the previous phases are analysed in detail. The system is also described in terms of what its major components will be, and how they will work in the overall solution. In particular, this phase has the following objectives:

• Refine strategic business requirements to a detailed level for incremental design
• Complete the solution architecture, identifying all of the objects or code and data elements necessary to model the domain in which the application(s) will work
• Establish standards and develop solutions to common problems, when those solutions will impact design, deployment and deployment of all parts of the system
• Define the development and delivery environments
• Detailed planning for this cycle of the implementation

The Roadmap can be summarised as providing the Plan, the Solution Requirements and the Solution Definition for the continuous implementation phase.

Foundation Activities are a vital step following completion of the Blueprint/Roadmap process and form the basis upon which all business and technology solutions will be built. Foundation Activities focus on aspects of each of the streams of development. A ’little bit’ of each one needs to be known before the other streams can be further fleshed out in Phase 4 and 5, but they are particularly focused on working on risk areas of the Technology Backplane.

Foundation Activities involve a number of steps to improve Data Governance, including the identification of the key data elements business and the root causes that most commonly lead to issues with this data. Metrics are also established before this data is quantitatively investigated and re-engineered.

Whereas Phases 4 and 5 are referred to as Design and Development and Testing, some aspects of this process actually occur in Foundation Activities as they are high risk areas of the project. Therefore, Data Modeling, Data Investigation and Data Re-Engineering all occur during Phase 3 as Information Development Foundation Activities (Data Modelling may actually start in Phase 1 with the Conceptual Model). Prototyping of the Business Intelligence environment also occurs during this phase, before the complete design in done in Phase 4. Ensuring readiness of the software development environment is also part of the set of Infrastructure Development Foundation Activities.

Major Deliverables

• Detailed Project Roadmap
• Testing and Deployment plans
• Detailed Information Modelling
• Key Data Elements (KDEs) for Data Governance established
• Recommended process and system changes for improved Data Governance
• Identification of root causes leading to Data Governance issues
• Data Governance Metrics
• Quantitative Data Investigation
• Improved Data Quality
• Business Intelligence Prototype
• Create/Revise Solution Architecture
• Ensure Readiness of Software Development Environment

Possible Changes to this Phase

With the proposed addition of a number of new activities, this phase may be broken out into those activities that cover the Roadmap and those that relate to Foundation Activities