Project Initiation

Owned by Andrew Donaldson
Last updated: May 10, 2023 by Boris Dingenouts
3 min read

Introduction

 

The purpose of the project initiation sprint is to set up the project on both the Pricefx side, but also (and more importantly!) on the customer’s side.

 

Often customers underestimate pricing projects a lot. Observations from past projects:

  • Customers do not assign the right resources, or not in sufficient capacity

  • Sometimes IT is not involved at all, while they play a crucial role in data delivery and making changes to their IT landscape

  • Sometimes when the project initiative was coming from the IT department, there was no or no sufficient business involvement

  • The project is not anchored well enough in the customer’s organization, with not enough senior management attention

  • During the sales cycle a lot of functionalities were discussed, but during negotiations only a subset of those functionalities ended up in the contract. This information might not have been cascaded throughout the customer’s organization

  • The customer’s project team delivering the project was not involved at all in the sales cycle; it might be all new (external) people with no prior knowledge on what the Pricefx sales team presented

 

The Project Initiation phase is together with the Foundation phase crucial for setting the project up for success.

The duration is typically 2-6 weeks.

 

Main activities

Typically the project starts when the PMs on both sides start their alignment. For guiding this we have the PFX Implementation Process Overview slide deck. This can be used as a template for the discussion with the customer.

Here the following agenda points need to be touched:

  • Explain the goal of the project initiation phase

  • Explain the Pricefx Project Implementation Methodology

    • Explain our hybrid agile model and the ‘why’ of each sprint

    • Explain about scope – the more we go in detail, the more the scope will grow. We need to focus on the MVP, or in terms of MoSCoW on the must-haves first, then the should haves, and all the rest is a bonus

  • Explain the customer’s roles and our roles

    • The customer’s PM should manage the initiative in their organization. The Pricefx PM manages the Pricefx team and organization. We are not hired to manage the customer’s stakeholders!

    • Customers need to define the user stories, including acceptance criteria. We can support, but they should be in the lead.

    • Customer’s should do unit testing and approval DURING the feature sprints. All user stories need to be closed after the sprint. During UAT testing there will be end-to-end test performed by the customer. They should share their UAT test scripts to Pricefx

    • The customer is responsible for delivering the data to Pricefx completely cleaned, aggregated and properly filtered. Pricefx is not a data warehouse and any data manipulation within Pricefx will negatively impact performance.

    • The customer is responsible for change management, training their endusers and enduser documentation. We offer commercial packages for training – all other training and documentation is on the customer. We train the customer’s team during sprint demos – this is the train-the-trainer concept.

    • Also the customer should take up first and second level support after the project. Pricefx only does third-level support. With the CSM the customer can discuss additional support options (Cosa, dedicated support).

  • Explain what the customer needs to do before the project starts:

    • Setup the proper project governance (Project Board, SteerCo, Architecture board - as needed)

    • Appoint Project team according the agreed roles and manage their allocation

    • In case this is not properly done yet, make a write-up of the business requirements in user stories

    • Follow Pricefx Business User training

    • Plan all activities around needed changes to non-Pricefx systems

    • Plan all change management activities

    • Plan all data readiness related activities – ideally already start this before the actual project start

      Especially data is very important and mostly underestimated. Emphasize this over and over again to our customers!

 

  • SoW Review & update project timeline

    • Review the SoW together, so there is a common understand on what is agreed contractually. This seems obvious, but very often this very often enlightens the customer on what was agreed we do

    • The project timeline is often created months before the actual start (as negotiations and getting an actual signature can take long). Therefore the plan needs to be updated based on constraints on both sides.

  • Prepare kickoff meeting

    • The kickoff meeting is not the Pricefx kickoff meeting. It is the joint project team’s kickoff meeting. Typically the structure is:

      • The Customer explains about the goals of the project, what they try to achieve etc

      • Our AE explains what Pricefx is

      • The customer’s PM explains the project plan

      • The Pricefx PM explains how we work together

 

Additional actions

Also in this phase it would be good to plan all meeting cadences already, so everyone’s agenda is blocked. This can be the following meetings:

  • Foundation workshops

  • User story refinement meetings

  • Sprint planning meetings

  • Daily standups

  • Sprint demo meetings

  • Sprint Retrospective meetings