one of the major classes that we teach at Kimble university is called the data warehouse lifecycle in-depth class and this class is really intended ideally for project teams that are new to the data warehouse and business intelligence design challenge and so it gives them a overall perspective that's fairly technical and fairly managerial at the same time for the end-to-end considerations in deploying these complex systems so we start certainly with the planning responsibilities we we make sure that they have a proper checklist of all the considerations for planning a complicated system designed like this we actually have three threads of different kinds of plans that we pursue in parallel what underlies all this is the underpinnings you might say of the whole responsibility is to look at the business requirements of the target client and that is actually a skill that that we teach in a pretty specific way we make sure that everybody on the team that is approaching the the client and is trying to do this design is really attuned to the true needs that the business users have the kind of key performance indicators that end up by being actual deliverables in in the structure of the data warehouse as well as the realities of the data that could actually support these these key performance indicators and we teach a skill that I don't think the users actually expect to be taught but they they usually enjoy it we say what's the actual technique for eliciting the right answers from a business user about how they make decisions and there's there's an obvious question that we tell them you can never ask and you should never ask and that is what do you want in a data warehouse it seems like the obvious question but the flaw in that is it puts a competent business user in the position of designing a computer system when they don't feel confident doing that and that's a subtle distinction that is lost on most IT people because they think that's a natural question so we we teach them how to ask the same question but in a way that feeds the comfort level of the business user by saying how do you do a great job in your role as ever ty manager for this major division and then they just usually open up and give us this wonderful stream of insights that they have in ways that they think about their business and your job of course is to write those down and to hear words that you've never heard before and then translate those into the business requirements we then tell our students that when you're armed with this wonderful set of answers from the business requirements the first thing you do is go try to find the data that might support that and so that's the the complimentary activity that occurs really right at the front line of this engagement with the customer we then in the class after we teach them how to get the ingredients for the design we say okay how are you going to turn the structure of the data into something that's understandable by the by the business user and that's where the dimensional modeling approach is the tried-and-true approach we invented that approach it is characteristic of the Kimbell group we are the authoritative source for that and of the four in this four-day class called the lifecycle class we teach about a day and a half of the dimensional modeling it is not the full deep treatment that we do with a four-day class but it gives the students a solid introduction to that and often serves as a springboard for them to go to to the full four day class at a later time however in the life cycle class we also go into the back room we talked about the extract transform and load operations in the you might say the basement or the back room of the data warehouse we talked about physical database design characteristics which is a reasonably technical topic we then go out into the front room which can be considered to be kind of like the dining room of a restaurant and we teach how to design the BI tools the business intelligence tools that can go against this platform of data that is easy to use and easy to understand we then put on our managers hat and say how do you know when you're ready to deploy into an environment what are the the criteria for readiness or do you have the training ready do you have the end user expectations ready do you have the data actually in a final form that can be used right away rather than just being a prototype or just being a demonstration so you know we make sure that we don't rush to the finish line with our with our designs until the business users are actually ready we then teach that our students how to plan for growth how to do system checkups from time to time going into the future and I will say that the whole approach is very congruent with a very parallel with what the agile development methodology that's used out there in many other development projects and it's in some sense it's a coincidence it's fortunate because we are very business oriented we empower the business user to control the project we believe in short term deliverables and and people who understand the agile approach find themselves surprisingly comfortable with the Kimbell approach even though we don't brand ourselves exactly in that way so that is the the overview and and the the the intention of the lifecycle class