In Chapters 4 through 7, we covered the five waterfall and agile Sure Step project types, including the templates that are provided for the project activities. Those templates include some of the project and change management templates we discussed in the above sections. In this section, we now turn our attention to initiating a project with the appropriate cross-section of these templates pre-populated depending on the user's selection.
Sure Step provides a feature called "Projects" for easy setup of project templates and efficient collaboration with project team members. This feature can be found under the second tab of the Sure Step application, and is appropriately titled, Projects, as shown in the following screenshot:
As a point of reference, the guidance, templates, and tools that we have referred up to this point reside under the first tab, labeled Sure Step Methodology, in the previous screenshot of the Sure Step application.
The Sure Step Projects feature can be executed to initiate projects on a local drive (or a shared drive), or on a SharePoint server. The process for initiating these projects is described next.
For creating projects, Sure Step provides an intuitive "Project Creation Wizard" that walks the user through the setup. The following screenshot shows one of the screens on the Wizard.
If the project is for a customer in a specific industry such as Process or Public Sector, or if the solution is a cross-industry solution such as XRM, the Solution dropdown provides those choices. Selecting one of those choices will then associate the corresponding templates in the project that is created. On the other hand, if the customer project is not for one of these industry or cross-industry solutions, a "General" solution value is provided, which attaches templates associated with the standard products.
The Product dropdown is where you select the appropriate Microsoft Dynamics product that the project is based on. The Wizard narrows down the choices depending on the solution selected—meaning if, for example, you select Public Sector, only CRM is provided as the product value because Sure Step only provides CRM solution guidance for Public Sector at this point. At a future point, when additional product coverage for a given industry is provided, the solution filter will provide the corresponding product values.
The Engagement Type dropdown provides multiple selections for the three different types of engagements supported by Sure Step.
- If the engagement is related to pre-sales/due diligence, the user selects Diagnostic Phase Offerings, which are the Decision Accelerator Offerings we described in the previous chapters. For this selection, the Wizard will then allow the user to select multiple Decision Accelerator Offerings, to support customer scenarios that call for the service provider to combine more than one offering in the due diligence process.
- If the engagement is for solution delivery, the user selects Implementation. In the next selection, the user is then asked to select one of the four waterfall project types, or the agile project type, as the basis for the implementation.
- If the engagement is for optimization or review, the user selects Optimization Offerings. Just like the Diagnostic Phase Offerings, the Optimization Offerings selection then allows the user to select multiple optimization or review offerings.
The wizard also provides a selection of whether the project should be created on a local drive or on a SharePoint server.
The use case for creating projects on a local drive is typically limited to smaller projects with a limited number of resources on the implementation team. In these cases, projects are typically set up and reside on the consultant's personal computer, and the deliverables are shared with the customer at appropriate times. Sure Step does, however, allow the user to change the default drive from "C:" to a shared drive, allowing for more resources to work on the same project. Other collaboration options such as exporting and importing these projects are also available in Sure Step.
Two screenshots of a project initiated for a general implementation of Microsoft Dynamics AX using the Standard project type are shown next:
Also shown in the screenshots is an alternate view of the documents—when the user clicks on a particular phase, such as the Analysis phase in this example, the view changes to a more detailed one that displays the document Description, the Owner role for this deliverable, and the participant Consulting Roles and Customer Roles.
The more popular use case for the Projects feature is to initiate a project on a SharePoint server. At the end of the project setup process, the Project Creation Wizard provides the user with an option of selecting SharePoint-based project. Upon specification of the corresponding URL for the SharePoint site, Sure Step will run through a check to ensure that the user has the appropriate privileges to create the site, and following a positive return, automatically populate the corresponding Sure Step templates to the site. The following screenshots show the steps in this process.
An example of the resultant SharePoint site is shown next. This example is of a SharePoint site created for a CRM project using the Enterprise project type.
The Sure Step Projects feature also provides a number of other useful options for the users. The "Change Logo" feature is a prime example of that.
The Sure Step templates come pre-populated with a Sure Step logo, which is also metadata-controlled. The metadata allows the users to make a universal change of the logo across all the documents in one quick step, using the "Change Logo" feature under Project Properties. The "Change Logo" feature supports a number of use cases, such as replacing the Sure Step logo with the customer's logo for a given project, or changing the logo to the service provider's logo to create a custom set of templates for their own organization.
The last point is an especially key one for service providers. The Projects feature allows for the saving, importing, and cloning of an existing project, thus facilitating the creation of project folders by industry, engagement size, engagement approach, and so on. Accordingly, the service provider may decide to create a set of project documents that, for example, their consulting teams would leverage as the starting point for all Automotive Manufacturing customers using Microsoft Dynamics AX Standard project type templates. Or they may create another folder for small, out-of-box deployments of Microsoft Dynamics SL using the Rapid project type. Or they may have another project folder for their CRM customers who prefer the Agile approach. Each of these templates could be pre-populated with the organization's logo, and key learning gleaned from past engagements.
Sure Step refers to this as the "60-20-20" rule, meaning that Sure Step provides the starting 60% of the templates, which the service provider then customizes and adds their 20% based on their expertise in a given area, and in the last 20% the consulting team transforms the templates into deliverables specific to the customer's environment.