What Does a Business Intelligence Project Manager Do?

A business intelligence project manager is a usually professional responsible for orchestrating and overseeing implementation of business intelligence software. When executives decide to update databases, however, they also might appoint a business intelligence project manager to oversee data custodial work. This kind of professional tends to have a strong understanding of the decision making process of his or her organization, as well as how decisions are impacted by Information Technology (IT) systems. For this reason, a perfect candidate for a business intelligence project manager position is a professional who has one foot in the IT field and the other in the managerial field.

Business intelligence describes all of the data that professionals use to make managerial and financial decisions. This term often is inseparable from the software that enables users to record, access, and share data. Business intelligence specialists, therefore, might serve as communicators between an executive level and an IT department.

A business intelligence project manager can either be an in-house manager who is appointed by an executive to lead a project or a representative from a consultant firm. In either case, he or she might begin by learning which kind of systems executives have decided to implement and to begin predicting how various processes might be impacted.

In most cases, business intelligence is shared among each department of an organization. For example, data recorded by a sales department later might be accessed by a professional from the marketing department. A project manager studies how the performance of one department affects performance of another. He or she aims to learn how IT systems should be designed and implemented in a way that provides greatest efficiency.

Much of what a business intelligence project manager does depends on how executives choose to prepare for a business intelligence project. For example, if an executive chooses first to enlist the help of a technological adviser, a business intelligence manager might not need to choose software and design a system. Instead, this work initially might be completed by an adviser. A project manager, however, might be responsible for overseeing the implementation of a system and testing it for performance flaws.

Training and assessment are common duties of a business intelligence project manager. As he or she introduces new software and data into a business system, he or she might be responsible for working one-on-one with employees. For project managers who are responsible for large organizations, the best choice might be to hold large-scale training sessions.