Last year at the PASS summit, I ran into someone and was discussing project management and Business Intelligence. They were so adamant that agile couldn’t work. And I had to correct them, as I have been doing agile now for three years at Trek in our BI group.
Yes, some things don’t exactly parallel to software development, but many things do. Sprints, Standups, estimations, stories, points, scrum master, releasing/delivering value on your iterations. And now even more with process like unit testing of SQL code and more, things are getting closer to software development in that regard.
I have an entire blog category dedicated to agile – more concepts but also talking about Business Intelligence teams in some of them.
Just remember, you can do BI and Agile, it works, and you can deliver a ton of value to the organization. Someone who might argue with you, well, they don’t know what they are doing in BI or in Agile, or the organization isn’t willing to change, which of course then it wouldn’t work.
Advice. Make sure you hold retrospectives, and make sure you make adjustments from whatever comes out of them.
