First Project-Lessons Learnt

It has been my first project undertaken (with independent ownership) so far working with the team. It has been an effort of around 3 months and I would be quiet unable to write everything of it in this mail. But still it would be a good idea , as I thought earlier(but don’t know why dropped the idea) and as my seniors suggested to list my learnings from the same which I have listed below:
Ø Looking from different angles(perspectives) : Yes,this is one of the most important things I have learnt to approach a problem from different angles or what you may call “LATERAL THINKING”. While making any change, examine each and every concerned aspect of the same .During the course of this project, we really kept on discovering new things till the end and learning more and more at every stage.
Ø Every small change needs thorough testing : Do the thorough testing for every bit of change. May be, you discover some new perspective of the problem in the same. Remember, a problem discovered at an early stage saves a lot of time(rework).
Ø Proper documentation : Always maintain a proper documentation for anything you do. This is a thing which I have been doing since the beginning of the project and has really helped me a lot. Whether it is some sample data or info about first run, it complements your work. Providing anyone with facts is much better than giving qualitative information. I mean, giving sample data for the prod run is better than saying “Prod run went fine”.
Ø Proper Review : Always supplement your work with a proper review from your peers giving them sufficient baseline of the work and the requirements. And then let them review from their own perspective.
Ø Clarifying the responsibilities with your partner : Always clarify with your partner the division of responsibilities and both should be very sure . A small mis-communication can lead to big problems.
Probably, there a lot more points in my mind which I am not able to transform into words. And I haven’t included any technical stuff in my learnings. Not that I have not learnt anything technically, but because these process related things were more prominent in the whole course and I think process related knowledge bears a lot of weight as far as the success of a project is concerned.

'Business Intelligence’ in my words

Being working as a technologist with Business intelligence group,I frequently come across these words as Data ,Databases, ‘Data Warehousing’ and ‘Business Intelligence’ and lots of them.But the 2 words ‘Data Warehousing ‘ and ‘Business Intelligence’ , I usually used to intermingle .And here I present my view of the Business Intelligence and the 2 terms and attempt to make a clear cut differentiation between the two.
Business Intelligence refers to the systems and technologies that provide the business a means for decision-makers to extract the personalized meaningful information about the business and industry as a whole that includes advanced decision support tools and the huge databases to support these tools.The data warehousing is this backroom database combined with the tools used to build and maintain such databases .The ETL(Extract,transform and Load) process is thus a part of data warehousing activities.
The Data Warehouse and the related warehousing activities form the back end office that support the Business Intelligence (combined with various other tools) as a whole .I call Business Intelligence as a thing that provides 360 view of the business.