Discussion
Pegasystems Inc.
US
Last activity: 14 Jul 2021 14:40 EDT
Ask the Expert - Pega Express - The Prepare Phase
Join Anthony Kirkham @AKirkham and Jason Ferguson @fergj as they answer your questions in our second session of Pega Express Ask the Expert series!
Ask your questions now, save this to your Favorites and join us March 8th - March 15th here in the Pega Collaboration Center!
Be sure to check out our 1st session: Ask the Expert - Pega Express - The Discover Phase that opened Monday, March 1st!
Meet Anthony:
Anthony has over 20 years’ experience delivering solutions to clients of all shapes and sizes, starting working life as a developer in the UK. He is now based in Sydney and is 5 years into his Pega journey. He spent 3 years as a Project Delivery Lead (PDL) before joining the Pega Express team in 2019. Anthony enjoys helping to drive the adoption of best practices and supporting clients, partners and Pega colleagues to achieve great things with Pega.
Meet Jason:
Jason joined Pega in 2013 as a Lead Business Architect within Professional Services. He was promoted to a Principal Business Architect in 2017 and held this position until joining Enterprise Advisory Services in 2019 as a Methodology Director. In his new role, Jason provides thought leadership and instruction to business and IT leaders on maturing their project delivery practices through staff identification and enablement on Pega technology and the adoption of an agile methodology paired with Pega best practices.
Message from Anthony and Jason:
Hi Everyone, we are excited to be answering your questions about the Prepare phase of the Pega Express approach! This phase is where the project kicks off, the solution is designed, governance is established, and you start creating a backlog of user stories ready for the build phase. Prepare and starting properly is critical to the success of any project, so we looking forward to hearing your Prepare phase questions!
Pegasystems Inc.
US
Hello everyone!
Our second session in our Pega Express series is now open to questions!
Please ask away and follow these rules outlined below.
Ask the Expert Rules
- Follow the Pega Collaboration Center’s Guidelines
- This is not a Live Chat - Anthony and Jason will reply to your questions over the course of the session (8 March - 15 March)
- Questions should be clearly and succinctly expressed
- Questions should be of interest to many others in the audience
- Have fun!
Pegasystems Inc.
AU
@MarissaRogers Thanks Marissa - I'm looking forward to having some questions to answer - the board has only just opened - who want to ask the first question? :-)
Endeavour Energy
AU
@AKirkham @fergj We faced scenario where there has been a time gap between completion of Discovery phase and kick off of Prepare phase's and when we kick started Prepare phase we found that some assumptions and Key decision made during discovery phase on which the MLP/Milestones were committed doesn't hold true anymore .
Is there a TollGate or checkpoint within Prepare phase to revalidate the outcome of Discovery before we kickstart Backlog grooming and solutioning in earnest ?
Pegasystems Inc.
AU
@Kuresh_Surury that's a great question. And a tricky one to get us started!
There are a few things that we do to help with this sort of situation. Not all of them may apply to your situation but hopefully this provides you with some guidance:
(1) We recommend a Sales to Delivery handover at the very start of Prepare or before it so that everyone is aligned on what the outcomes are, what the MLP roadmap is and a walkthrough of any proof of concepts assets we can reuse are etc. Its an opportunity for the delivery team to ask the sales team lots of questions so that they are ready for Prepare and well informed. This is also a chance to ask Sales what may have changed - typically conversations continue between Discover and Prepare starting, generally led by sales, so they should be well informed. The delivery team may not know about this though - a sales to delivery handover gives you that opportunity to ask and test assumptions.
(2) In the lead up to Prepare, the agenda needs to be set and this is often an iterative conversation between you / your lead and the client project manager / scrum master / product owner. A draft is created, discussed, improved etc before being agreed upon on. That's an opportunity to also ensure that nothing has changed - when having that conversation.......which leads to the next point....
@Kuresh_Surury that's a great question. And a tricky one to get us started!
There are a few things that we do to help with this sort of situation. Not all of them may apply to your situation but hopefully this provides you with some guidance:
(1) We recommend a Sales to Delivery handover at the very start of Prepare or before it so that everyone is aligned on what the outcomes are, what the MLP roadmap is and a walkthrough of any proof of concepts assets we can reuse are etc. Its an opportunity for the delivery team to ask the sales team lots of questions so that they are ready for Prepare and well informed. This is also a chance to ask Sales what may have changed - typically conversations continue between Discover and Prepare starting, generally led by sales, so they should be well informed. The delivery team may not know about this though - a sales to delivery handover gives you that opportunity to ask and test assumptions.
(2) In the lead up to Prepare, the agenda needs to be set and this is often an iterative conversation between you / your lead and the client project manager / scrum master / product owner. A draft is created, discussed, improved etc before being agreed upon on. That's an opportunity to also ensure that nothing has changed - when having that conversation.......which leads to the next point....
(3) We always have an early vision alignment session during Prepare. Has anything changed? That's a definite opportunity to check assumptions, as a team
(4) We also have a Day 1 Live Plan that is designed to make sure the business are prepared for go live. While this is a relatively high level arfetact, its powerful in making sure everyone is on the same page. We use that to help the conversation during the vision alignment session mentioned above.
Hopefully that answers your question - if not, let me know :-).
Areteans
AU
@MarissaRogers, How does the Prepare phase relates to or differ from the traditional DCO methodology? and is there a difference since the focus is on micro journeys?
Pegasystems Inc.
AU
@Navinda Another great question.
We use DCO (Directly Capture Objectives) during Prepare; it's very much a part of the Prepare phase rather than being distinct from it. Prepare is a phase. DCO is a way of working to accelerate delivery, by making the most of the visual tools in the Pega platform to help guide the business e.g. App Studio, Agile Workbench, Next Best Action Designer.
During Prepare, we use DCO to capture the microjourneys in the Pega Platform using App Studio. Ideally this process would have started during Discover. However during Prepare, we work a lot more closely with the business and IT to create the detailed design.
This means that we capture a stages and steps model for each case type and we do this in a DCO workshop. Your first microjourney may involve only one or a handful of case types. We capture each case type, the personas, channels and the data we need. The Product Owner can see what the microjourney is going to look like and give us early feedback.
Pegasystems Inc.
US
@Navindaone more thing about DCO, it is a continuous process that is done throughout Pega Express. That means it is not something that is ONLY done during Discover, Prepare, Build, and Adopt; rather, there are DCO activities we do for each of the Pega Express phases. Here is an outline of these activities:
Discover
- Align on vision
- Define business outcomes
- Ideate on a design solution
- Prototype solution
Prepare
- Ideate on a design solution
- Prototype solution
- Elaborate prototype to build out product backlog
Build
- Continue to elaborate prototype and add to the product backlog
- Groom highest priority user stories to ensure they meet the Definition of Ready
Adopt
@Navindaone more thing about DCO, it is a continuous process that is done throughout Pega Express. That means it is not something that is ONLY done during Discover, Prepare, Build, and Adopt; rather, there are DCO activities we do for each of the Pega Express phases. Here is an outline of these activities:
Discover
- Align on vision
- Define business outcomes
- Ideate on a design solution
- Prototype solution
Prepare
- Ideate on a design solution
- Prototype solution
- Elaborate prototype to build out product backlog
Build
- Continue to elaborate prototype and add to the product backlog
- Groom highest priority user stories to ensure they meet the Definition of Ready
Adopt
- Provide knowledge transfer to business and technical teams that will provide production support
- Identify product enhancements from end user/customer feedback
- Continue elaboration and grooming sessions to add to the product backlog
Attached is a graphic that depicts the above information. It is a good reference to share with team members to educate them that DCO is a continual process throughout Pega Express. By doing so, we facilitate collaboration, iteration, and validation between the end user/customer, business, and IT. This ensures a shared visual model on the Pega platform, which we use to document business needs, design solutions, and elicit feedback, so that we may achieve our desired outcome.
Pegasystems Inc.
US
I wanted to say a huge thank you to our experts @fergj and @AKirkham for being here this week to answer your questions!
And thank you, our Pega Collaboration Center members for your questions and participation regarding the Prepare phase of our Pega Express Ask the Exper series!
You can get additional information about Pega Express along with its Preprare, Discover, Build, and Adopt phases on the Pega Express Methodology page on Pega Community.
And don't forget to check out our 3rd session that is currently open for questions: Ask the Expert - Pega Express - The Build Phase until the 5th of April!