The sheer complexity of Oracle's database products necessitates a book like this. Heaton offers this to someone perhaps trying to avoid wading through the voluminous official Oracle documentation on its vast product stack. Instead, it might be fruitful for you to invest some time in skimming through the 80 or so recipes given here, to see if any are germane to your current problems.
The arrangement of the book is decidely top down. The first few chapters describe how to define a program, starting a project and controlling it. Most of these chapters do not directly use any Oracle product. Instead, the design can be recorded in any means convenient to your group. The recipes here are really indistinguishable from general guidelines in another book.
You are advised to invest time early on, and not skip over the introductory chapters because they seem trivial. Bad high level decisions can ruin the implementation later on. You should also take care to flesh out the blueprint, as per chapter 5. As much detail as you can devise, perhaps, should be put into the blueprint. Write out a decomposition of the overall project into processes, where these can be manual or automated. If at all possible, define metrics for each process. These will be pertinant later in reporting analysis that provides a vital feedback loop for you to monitor the entire project.
Later chapters are where, finally, you get down to using Oracle products. Like when analysing requirements. Oracle offers a SQL Developer data modelling tool to capture descriptions. The book even goes into giving an entire chapter on studying the sources of information that will be input to the project. Here the importance is in finding reliable sources. In part, this lets you validate your top data model.
In summary, the book can be treated as not just specific to using Oracle products. Though of course you can certainly do just that. More broadly, it has many useful tips (recipes) on managing a data analysis project and team.
