The Kimball lifecycle is a methodology for developing data warehouses, and has been developed by Ralph Kimball and a variety of colleagues. Program or project planning According to Ralph Kimball et al., this phase is the start of the lifecycle. It is a planning phase in which project is a single iteration of the lifecycle while program is the broader coordination of resources. When launching a project or program Kimball et al. suggests following three focus areas: Defining and scoping the project Plan the project Manage the project Program and project management This is an ongoing discipline in the project. The purpose is to keep the project/program on course, develop a communication plan and manage expectations. Business requirements definition This phase/milestone of the project is about making the project team understand the business requirements. Its purpose is to establish a foundation for all the following activities in the lifecycle. Kimball et al. makes it clear that it is important for the project team to talk with the business users and be prepared to focus on listening and to document the interview. An output of this step is the enterprise bus matrix. Technology track The top track holds two milestones: Technical architecture design is supposed to create a framework for the data warehouse or business intelligence system. The main focus in this phase is to create a plan for the application architecture, while considering business requirements, technical environment and the planned strategic technical directions. Product selection and installation use the architecture plan to identify what components are needed to complete the data warehouse or business intelligence project. This phase then selects, installs and tests the products. Data track Dimensional modeling is a process in which the business requirements are used to design dimensional models for the system. Physical design is the phase where the database is designed. It involves the database environment as well as security. Extract, transform, load (ETL) design and development is the design of some of the heavy procedures in the data warehouse and business intelligence system. Kimball et al. suggests four parts to this process, which are further divided into 34 subsystems (Kimball et al., 2008): Extracting data Cleaning and conforming data Delivering data for presentation Managing the ETL system Business intelligence application track Business intelligence application design deals with designing and selecting some applications to support the business requirements. Business intelligence application development use the design