Review on “Effectiveness of Agile Implementation Methods in Business Intelligence Projects from an End-User Perspective”(Kisielnicki and Misiak, 2016)

Due to uncontrollable rapid changes on organizational needs, the traditional methods used in Business Intelligence (BI) implementation are not already efficient. The products are often found useless because the functionalities are no longer needed by the organizations. The traditional methods are no longer efficient because of inability to accept timely change request, the authors tested the effectiveness of Agile implementation methods to the project delivery.
The Agile implementation methods were compared to traditional implementation methods(waterfall approach). The traditional methods are concentrated in project scope to determine the cost and time schedule as mentioned in the article which is I believe that this is only the advantage of traditional methods compared to Agile because in project proposal, cost and time are very important. To introduce Agile, the authors mentioned the following advantages:
1. Agile methods require a change of thinking and a different approach.
2. Agile concentrates on business values using them to determine quality levels and possible technology constraints.
3. Agile seems to be more appropriate for a somewhat chaotic and unstable environment, lacking a clear vision.
4. Agile relies primarily on a so-called approach of shared values.
5. Agile structures are flat, collaborative, and based on a mutual inspection.
Evolutionary prototyping summarizes the processes of Agile methods. It involves iteration processes which makes the project product adaptive to the technology constraints that may arise during development. The team can also work together with different solutions simultaneously. With this effort, the project team can deliver more completed works. Therefore, the Agile gives quality over scope and schedule.
According to the article, the of BI solutions made the businesses exceed to their common achievements. The surveys mentioned said that there are good effects of BI solutions such as: it provide growth and business development, improve cost control processes, and increase the level of customer service. Behind that success, the authors have enumerated the several problems during the implementations of BI solutions. They are as follows:
1. A long development cycle and less visibility to user.
2. Users are not involve in development cycles.
3. After the design phase, there is no possibility to modify analytical requirements.
4. Testing is at the end of the development cycle, again without a possibility for change requests.
5. A different language: the developers think in terms of code, the business thinks in terms of business value and solution designers think in terms of customer experience.
Based on the mentioned several problems, the author suggest a possible solution for these and that is the use of Agile methods. The best Agile method can be used is the Active Stakeholder Participation (ASP). ASP needs the high involvement of the user to provide timely decisions regarding the requirements and prioritization.
The authors conducted a case study in a telecommunications company using the Agile methods, and they were able to prove its effectiveness because of the competitive Return of Investments (ROI) factor results. The user expectations were met and the first product delivered was used. In the case study, the authors evaluated the effectiveness of Agile methods by conducting a survey for the Agile principles. The result have answered the several problems presented earlier.
In conclusion, the Agile methods are proven their effectiveness in BI projects implementations compared to traditional methods. The Agile approach provides methods and techniques that were able to address the constant involvement of users to provide timely decisions, easy adaptability to changes when required, frequent functionalities delivery, fast ROI, and easy and cost-effective maintenance after BI implementation. The authors show also interest to make further researches to provide more evidence for this issue.