Relationship Discovery is hard. So what?

We’ve previously discussed why relationship discovery is so hard, but what does this mean for you? What is the impact on the business? Why should I care?

All important questions. We agree with the sentiment. Don’t buy stuff you don’t need - even if it from us. We’ve brought Relait and Kindred to the market because we think it solves a real business problem, that continues to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars per project.

Relationship discovery is a foundational practice, even if you don’t know it or recognise it in these terms. It helps business people to accurately describe their business to technical folk in terms of business rules. Because this discovery process is flawed in most cases, the business rules given to the technical folk are inevitably incomplete or downright wrong. Worse still, it usually takes a long time to figure out that they are wrong.

As a result, data intensive projects start with some combination of;

• the wrong data; 
• the wrong business rules;
• the wrong expectations of success;
• goals that are incompatible with reality.

This leads to lengthy project delays, large cost overruns, extended time-to-value, reduced business impact, and a compromised business case.

That’s if you’re lucky. If you’re unlucky, you never get the data right, you cancel the project after spending all your budget or, worse, you go into production delivering the wrong results AND maintenance and support costs increase. Ouch.

A solution but no silver bullets

How do you fix this? I would love to tell you we have a silver bullet. We don’t. There are no silver bullets. Ever. Instead, we have a technology that will make the discovery process work.

Finding and documenting the reality of how your data relates to each other becomes the bedrock of your project. It is something to return to when uncertainties arise. Use the information in consultation with people who know the business process and benefits, and the technical folk who must translate that into an operational, valuable, and supportable business application.

The material impact this has is to reduce cycle times. It reduces the number of iterations you go through to get the right answer - but it does not eliminate them altogether. Cutting down seemingly endless test and fix cycles is where the benefits of cost reduction and time-to-value are most acute. Project risk-reduction is also a big win - from both delivery risk but also information security. We can tell you exactly where your most sensitive data is - even if it is hidden deeply in comment fields.

What does this add up to? On a 6 month project, with 6 people at an average $1,200 per day, we reckon that we can knock a third off the delivery time and save around $300,000. On one project.

I reckon your project manager and business sponsors would be pleased with that.

Contact us for a free trial and see how quickly you can Relait.