Sunday, November 4, 2012

SSRS - Good Practice

This post talks about one of the good practice for an SSRS developer, the importance of generating mock report prior to report implementation. A couple of years ago I was at a bank making SSRS reports as part of a multi-phase, large scale project. The project leader who is on his last project before his retirement. He is extremely experienced and is also known to have a bottomless pocket because even though he keep claiming the budget is tight, but for some reason he is always able to squeeze out the extra budget required to handle any unexpected scenarios. During phase 1 there was about 10 reports made, I completed them according to the specifications which was solely based on the data that needs to be shown and the parameters required. Most of them are to replace today's excel reports so I was given samples to use as design guideline. The report were completed and deployed prior to deadline so I was quite proud of myself. However, that's when the fun begins, I start getting numerous change requests regarding the layout of the report, either the number format, the width of the column, the order of columns, and even the color choice of the header background. Though they are change requests so technically it isn't my fault, but these excessive communication pushed the release date of reports back. When the first phase was completed I had a meeting with my project leader to discuss my performance, and he challenged me to minimize the change requests by hitting on the spot of what the client wants on first try. He then suggested a mock report that simulates the layout and submit it to the client for approval prior to the report implementation. He is aware that it will prolong the implementation time, but the time saved afterward is well worth it. I took his advice and start making excel mock reports for phase 2, and I am able to cut down the change request by 90%, most report were accepted right away while a few of them had a couple of small changes that was not picked up with the mock report. Since I am pretty good with excel, it only took me about an hour for each report but they saved me days of follow-up work. Phase 2 and 3 went smoothly with his advice and I have since then included this into my best practice list.

2 comments:

  1. Hi there! This is a good read. I will be looking forward to visit your page again and for your other posts as well. Thank you for sharing your thoughts about business intelligence consulting. I am glad to stop by your site and know more about business intelligence consulting. Keep it up!
    Often BI applications use data gathered from a data warehouse or a data mart. However, not all data warehouses are used for business intelligence, nor do all business intelligence applications require a data warehouse.
    Business Intelligence consulting is about identifying, harnessing, cleansing, standardizing and consolidating key enterprise data and presenting that in an appropriate medium that can be accessed and analyzed by business users in a secure environment to provide insight into business performance and empower superior decision-making.

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  2. Hi Jackie,

    Welcome to this blog. I agree with you that BI is not about technology, database, but rather identifying a business problem and come up with a way to provide the answer to the business question with data.

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