Every BI project has its own life cycle. Let us look at a common life cycle:

The first step is Analyze Business requirements, which means that we should gather the business requirements and transform them into functional and non-functional specifications, create a template for reports, and so on. The next step is Design the logical data model, where we build a logical data model based on business requirements, which shows the business entities and the relationships between them. The third step is Design the physical data model, where we transform the logical data model into a physical data model which defines the structure of the data warehouse. The fourth step is Build the data warehouse. In this step, we create the data warehouse, build data marts, and load data.

On the fifth step, Create the Project, we start to work directly in MicroStrategy, where we define schema, attributes, facts, hierarchies and so on. All this information is stored in metadata, the core of MicroStrategy, in a relation database. The sixth step is Develop Reports/Documents and of course dashboards. In addition, we share our insights across the organization using various channels such as email, FTP, and so on.