How is the state of your Business Intelligence (BI) program? Are you sure you have sound technical plans? Are you staffing your projects with adequate resources? Are goals clear and achievable? Are the lessons learned effectively communicated between projects? Are costly corrections frequently occurring post implementation? Is corporate intellectual capital captured and managed? Implementing a tollgate process will enable your BI program to avoid these issues.

Most methodologies contain deliverables and milestones that a project team executes against throughout a project. While providing a good structure for delivery, these milestones typically are addressed within the confines of the project team. A tollgate elevates specific milestones to go/no-go decision points, events where collective knowledge and experiences are brought to bear on the review and significant trade-offs can be made.

Before proceeding with the rest of the article, keep in mind that a system development methodology is a necessary foundation for incorporating a successful tollgate process. Once the foundation is in place, a tollgate process can be developed, integrated and continuously enhanced to suite your organization’s needs. It is not unusual that certain tollgates are added or skipped depending on the varying types of projects. That is, larger projects may require more tollgates and /or different participants, while small projects may not be as demanding. Essentially, do what makes sense; yet establish a standard set of tollgates that are consistently applied across like projects.

The tollgate review team should be diverse consisting of the business sponsor; appropriate business and technology decision makers; technical and business experts not associated with the project; project team members including project managers and technical leads; and a facilitator to manage the continuity of the meeting.