The Solution Alignment Workshop

In this topic, the Solution Alignment Workshop, its position in the sales cycle, and how to perform the workshop, are explained.

Pega provides a prescriptive sales-to-implementation process. 

Pega helps the customer through the journey of identifying the right customer-centricity journey and where to start, to development of the first successful project and consecutive projects, and continuous improvement of the Business as Usual to get the maximum value of the solution.

During the Solutions Alignment Workshop, you evaluate the delivery entry criteria and confirm the project definition's scope — the Minimum Lovable Product (MLP) — that is associated with the selected microjourney. These first 90 days are critical to setting the stage for future success. For this reason, a complete and correct verification of the requirements for MLP start is of major importance.

Successfully executing a Pega Customer Decision Hub™ roadmap starts from the first MLP.

For this reason, the scope needs to:

• Be broad enough to create value
• Be narrow enough be executed in 90 days
• Fit the approved use cases, warranted by the execution of the microjourney workshop and opportunity assessment
• Be robust for future phases

The first foundational phase includes setting up the environments and applications, and governance and other organizational processes.

As it is the first project, it exposes the client teams to a new way of working, and as such a significant amount of enablement naturally occur in this MLP.

The primary goal of the Solution Alignment Workshop is to ensure that the various client teams understand what needs to be prepared in advance of project kick-off to accomplish a 90-day MLP and ensure the future success of the Next Best Action program.

This involves four major areas:

1. Determine business goals and desired benefits:
   • What does success look like?
   • Align on MLP scope, including timelines, milestones, and measures of success.
2. Review the impacts between Customer Decision Hub and your existing customer interaction applications and identify, at a high level, the initial Next Best Actions, channel integrations, data, reporting, business operations, and governance processes that are required to support the Pega Customer Decision Hub program.
3. Establish the high-level project plan, tasks, and milestones to accomplish the MLP and to establish the roadmap and Business as Usual organization to support the continuous growth of the program.
4. Determine and identify the resources, roles, and responsibilities from within the client teams that are required to accomplish the client-assigned work tasks and the appropriate Pega training and enablement for them.

The Solution Alignment Workshop is a concentrated effort conducted by a small team:

• Pega Consulting-led
• Supported by the Pega Sales and Solution Consulting Teams
• Supported by key “client" business and IT resources including business sponsor, process owners, subject matter experts, business analysts, IT lead, architect
• Agenda is mutually established to optimize participant time

The following main deliverables come out of the workshop:

• Timeframe, criteria, and metrics for success
• Solution architecture, integrations, data and reporting needs and testing scope
• Identified "client" product owners and required business and technical resources
• Validated sizing (such as use cases and campaigns, strategies, actions, treatments, models, interfaces, data, reports, testing, training, and production coverage) for MLP and initial backlog for subsequent releases
• A high-level project plan and set project start date
• Confirmed resource requirements, hardware capacity and environments and proposed availability dates

Pega Customer Decision Hub work streams can be divided into five major areas or work tracks each with key activities and deliverables.

1. Strategy and Enterprise Vision
2. Program and  Project Management (PDL)
3. Business Operations Processes and Transformation (MBC)
4. Business Tracks (LDA)
5. Technical Tracks (LSA)

These areas are represented in the workshop agenda.

Here is a template agenda for a two-week virtual Solutions Alignment Workshop. The agenda covers the following topic areas:

• Strategy and Enterprise Vision
  • Background and business review
  • High-level demo
  • Review microjourneys, business goals, and success metrics
• Business Tracks (LDA)
  • Next Best Action success mapping
  • Review action hierarchy and action catalog
  • Review arbitration
  • Review modelling approach
  • Review data model
  • Review UX
• Business Operations Processes and Transformation (MBC)
  • Review end-to-end Next Best Action management process
  • Review reporting
  • Review continuous improvement approach
• Technical Tracks (LSA)
  • Review high-level application and data management architecture
  • Review proposed infrastructure Premise/Cloud and security
  • Review application integrations
  • Review data ingestion processes
  • Review data extract processes
  • Review approach for functional and non-functional testing
  • Review deployment processes
• Program and Project Management (PDL)
  • Review project workstreams
  • Review project and program governance
  • Review resource requirements and enablement

Here is an example agenda performed at real-world client site.

Here is a detailed overview of the resources required for the Solutions Alignment Workshop.

From the Pega side, you need a Project Delivery Lead Marketing Business Consultant, Lead Decisioning Architect, Lead System Architect, and an Account Team (AE, SC & CSE)

Resources from the client side are also required for a successful Solutions Alignment Workshop. The client requires a Program Sponsor, Product Owner, IT Executive Sponsor, and an Application Development Manager.

The client requires the following resources only as needed:

• Project Management Leads
• Marketing Ops, Decisioning and Marketing Management Leads
• Business Analytics Lead
• IT Architecture Lead
• Channel Development Leads
• Data Management Leads
• Infrastructure Lead and
• Testing Leads