Prior to joining Seer 365, Paul Walton, one of our Senior Product Development Managers, worked as a Senior Consultant implementing ERP solutions for over 25 years, and with Microsoft Dynamics 365 for over 10 years. In this blog article, Paul shares some of the challenges he typically faced when gathering customer requirements and then subsequently implementing Dynamics 365.
In this article, I discuss the issues and challenges that I typically faced at the front-end of a project gathering customer requirements and then implementing a Dynamics 365 system that was ‘fit for purpose’. I will also discuss the toolset that is available now, that would have made my life so much easier, had it existed back then.
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Inadequate Project Initiation
Despite the best intentions, some projects fall short of customer expectations, unable to fulfil the promises of supporting business growth, delivering cost savings, and meeting specified objectives within agreed timelines and budget.
This ‘project failure’ often stems from the project not being initiated correctly from the start. Among the many root causes, inaccurate and poorly defined requirements, often because of poor requirements gathering practice, stand out to me as a primary reason for project failure. Without a solid foundation of clearly defined, detailed customer requirements, it’s very difficult to navigate the complexities of a project implementation successfully, whilst staying aligned with your customer.
Mastering Requirements Gathering - from functional knowledge to business process understanding
Effective requirements gathering isn’t just about functional knowledge; it requires an understanding of end-to-end business processes and practices. While specific business software knowledge is beneficial, it’s secondary to grasping the fundamentals and intricacies of business operations. Gathering comprehensive, clear, and unambiguous requirements heavily depends on domain knowledge, implementation experience and the ability to ask well-formed insightful questions.
Traditional methods of capturing requirements include one-to-one interviews, larger workshop sessions, observational shadowing, and shopfloor process walkthroughs. Regardless of the technique used, the details are often captured as notes (handwritten or using a note-taking application), which then requires significant time investment to organise and structure before sharing them with the client. These details are then formalised into artefacts, such as a requirements backlog or a requirements traceability matrix, to ultimately form the foundation and reference for the solution design. However, this process isn’t without its challenges.
For a Junior Consultant or someone that is relatively new to business system implementation projects, gathering and documenting business requirements can be a daunting task. Even with guidance from experienced consultants, navigating the intricacies of this task requires a steep learning curve.
For a Solution Architect and Lead Consultants, supporting less experienced team members and ensuring quality and completeness of documented requirements can be time-consuming. Balancing these responsibilities with other project commitments often leads to time constraints and personal sacrifices.
These outlined challenges can quickly result in broader repercussions on the quality of project deliverables, timelines, and budgets.
Mitigating these challenges and enhancing your Microsoft Dynamics 365 projects
Addressing the challenges many of us face when gathering requirements is key to mitigating the risk of project failure. Fostering collaboration, leveraging effective communication channels, and improving your business systems knowledge can all help.
Picture this… a toolset that provides:
- Well-defined requirements gathering questions: A structured library of insightful requirements gathering questions that can be used as both a guide during requirements gathering activities, as well as a means of capturing requirements detail. A tool that allows people from both parties (partners and customers) to add notations and comments to one live document.
- Notes are automatically compiled, removing the need for handwritten notes or OneNote: A toolset that enables consultants to move beyond taking handwritten notes (or use of OneNote or similar) during workshops and follow-up sessions as the questions collect all the key information needed.
- Live comments and feedback: Enabling clients, solution architects, and lead consultants to access and review all gathered requirement details, and add their feedback, comments, or notes, quickly and easily.
- Ability to add fit/gap analysis: The tool can be used by consultants and solution architects to add a fit/gap analysis and design commentary.
- Auto-generated output reports: Once the questions have been answered by the customer, output reports are auto-generated, containing clear, unambiguous, and succinct requirement details.
- Produce draft analysis and design artefacts: Draft analysis and design project artefacts are generated, such as the requirements backlog, which is a prioritised list of all the requirements needed for an implementation project.
- Direct integration with Azure DevOps: Direct integration with Azure DevOps (or similar) to generate work items and create a baseline project ready for task and activity level planning, providing a solid foundation for subsequent implementation and application lifecycle management tasks, such as test planning and management.
The good thing is this toolset already exists. Read on to find out…
Developed by Seer 365, the GYDE365 Platform addresses the frustrations of both implementation partners and their customers caused by the time, risks and costs associated with traditional methods of requirements gathering, designing and deploying Dynamics 365 solutions. Resource-heavy processes and multiple workshops have been replaced by a tool that provides rapid, online requirements capture and automated output report creation, and much more.
Want to find out how our GYDE365 Platform can help transform your requirements gathering processes? Book a short demo
Written by Paul Walton
Paul Walton is one of our Senior Product Development Managers and has worked for Seer 365 for almost four years. Paul has extensive experience working as a Senior Consultant within the Microsoft Dynamics 365 ecosystem, having worked for more than 10 years and within the wider ERP sector for more than 25 years.