1. You need good power Point presentations to present your project to the business areas . The power point presentation need to show balance between technical terms and easily understood words. You need to highlight the main advantages that the business areas can get from your big data project .
2. A senior manager should be a sponsor for the project . The senior manager should be passionate about the project and be strong in marketing so the advantages can be explained effectively to senior managers in the business areas . The senior manager in IT should also have the power in a hierarchical sense so that any misunderstandings between the internal IT departments can be effectively clarified.
3.You need to form a cross divisional team involving the big data team and the main business users . This team will test the big data environment in the development environment and provide critical feedback that ensures that the final product in production is what the users expect.
4.You need a coordinator for handling all process related aspects . Some of the things are change management , requests for servers , certificates , Active Directory groups , application accounts , release policy , capacity management, user access management , network related firewall requests , contribution to system architecture document , system technical specification etc. The time required for these topics should not be underestimated. The coordinator should be a senior technical expert .
5.You need a good business analyst who has multiple years of experience working on datawarehousing projects and knows how to communicate effectively with the business users and senior management.
6. Make sure you have atleast 3 good Hadoop admins . They should be able to troubleshoot issues with the various services , follow up with Cloudera regarding any identified bugs or issues , willing to learn and have a honest and open attitude .
7.Try to automate repeated requests for support.It should be a common understanding among the team that identifying opportunities to automate daily tasks is very important.
8.An experienced project manager has to take care of the budget , project plan , coordinating with the vendors , identifying areas of improvement in the working culture of both the internal and external teams.
9.Identify common patterns . This could be different use cases for ingesting data into the Big data platform ( e.g HDFS ). Provide optimal solutions for those patterns. This will help other application teams who would like to send data to your big data platform .
10.Make sure your knowledge base covering frequently asked questions and self help guides for users to be able to work with your big data platform is continuously updated. This should be a collective effort from the your big data team .
