Overview of Success by Design

  • 10 minutes

With Success by Design, the solution architect can engage with project teams through strategic workshops that are aligned to key project stages with clear goals, actions, and deliverables. Each workshop has been designed with specific goals and maps to relevant success measures for the project. A workshop is essentially an alignment exercise that allows the solution architect to assess if best practices are being followed and identify and highlight issues or potential risks that can derail the project. While Success by Design offers prescriptive guidance for success, be prepared to make minor adjustments to the stages and details that are relevant to your specific projects.

Success by Design offers solution architects a framework for effective engagement with customers in support of their specific goals and outcomes. This guidance provides a model for proactive engagement with customers to have a greater impact on success rather than only handling reactive escalations.

Additionally, Success by Design reduces the amount of reactive issue escalation by using active course correction throughout the project. Frequent knowledge transfer enables cross-pollination of ideas, learning, and best practices across projects. This feature will ensure that business goals are strategically aligned with product capabilities to maximize the value that your customers will receive from the platform.

Solution architects can use Success by Design prescriptive guidance to help increase user adoption of the system by monitoring usage of new features and evangelizing the latest capabilities that are relevant to your customer's business process and pain points. Timely guidance and architectural inputs will be provided to ensure that the delivered solution performs well and is scalable, that it not only meets current needs, but also meets the future demands of the customer's business.

Essentially, Success by Design brings the learning and experiences from thousands of customer cloud deployments to your project to help make the journey to the cloud smoother, faster, and more successful.  

Summary of workshops

As previously discussed, Success by Design has several workshops. Each workshop is a module within this learning path. The following sections summarize some of those key workshops. Templates are available for each workshop, and you can download examples of the templates that you need.

The workshops are not in a prescribed order; you can return to a topic more than once for any given project. For example, integrations should be designed, built, tested, and supported. You might find overlap in topics, and even if no specific overlap exists, a general awareness of the other aspects is a vital part of success. This module will go into much greater detail of each workshop, but the following sections provide a summary of what to expect for each. The subsequent sections list the workshop topics in this learning path and in the order in which they can be implemented in a typical project.

Solution blueprint

The goal of the Success by Design framework is to ensure a successful customer outcome for each implementation. By starting with the Solution blueprint review, the team can review the overall solution plan and help offer suggestions and course corrections early. The purposes for the Solution blueprint review are to:

  • Drive communication and understanding – The Solution blueprint review is designed to drive a conversation about the solution that promotes general understanding across the implementation team regarding the goals, scope, architecture, and approach to implementing the solution.

  • Identify risks and issues – By taking a broad but high-level look at the solution, it is possible to identify issues and risks with the solution design or implementation approach that will negatively impact the outcome.

  • Establish a baseline of subsequent reviews – Based on establishing a general understanding of the solution, the FastTrack solution architect who is involved can build a plan for follow-up workshop activities to investigate aspects of the solution where additional guidance might provide benefits.

Test strategy

An effective test strategy will allow for a holistic view of the proposed solutions. Testing will happen in several different phases of development, but you should define the strategy early. The purposes of the test strategy review are to:

  • Drive communication and understanding – The Test strategy review is designed to drive a conversation about the test strategy that promotes general understanding across the implementation team regarding the testing objectives, test types, test coverage and planning, and approach to validating the solution.

  • Identify risks and issues – By taking a broad but high-level look at the test strategy, it is possible to identify issues and risks with the approach that would negatively impact the outcome.

  • Provide recommendations – Based on the identified risks, Microsoft will provide recommendations to help you best manage and mitigate the risks.

Data model

The Data model workshop is dedicated to reviewing the envisioned data model for the customer project. The data model usually reflects the functional scope of the project. It also reveals its potential complexity if it contains numerous tables, complex relationships, impact on security, or use or misuse of standard objects, large number of custom tables, and so on.

BI and analytics design

The goal of the BI and analytics design workshop is to ensure that the BI and analytics solution design is well understood, planned, and that it is appropriate for the solution strategies and technologies that are used. You should be collecting insights on the implementation activities, reviewing the current planned solution design, and raising recommendations/risks/issues that are related to the plan and solution strategies.

The purposes of the BI and analytics design workshop are to:

  • Drive communication and understanding – The BI and analytics design workshop drives a conversation about the business intelligence and reporting requirements of the project that promotes general understanding across the implementation team regarding the reporting goals, scope, architecture, and approach to implementing the reporting solution.

  • Identify risks and issues – By taking a broad but high-level look at the BI solution and strategy, it is possible to identify issues and risks with the solution design or implementation approach that will negatively impact the outcome.

Gap solution design

The Gap solution design workshop is designed to ensure that the gap solution design provides a good approach and plan to deliver a well-defined, well-tested, reliable, and safe solution. You can complete this approach by collecting insights on the implementation activities, reviewing the current gap solution blueprint, and raising recommendations/risks/issues that are related to the planned customizations.

Data migration

The Data migration workshop offers advice and guidance when you are doing data migration with Dynamics 365. The workshop provides best practices to help you avoid data migration performance issues, gain a proper understanding of business goals, and develop awareness on realistic throughput.

Security model

The Security model workshop delves into the customer-designed security model in Dynamics 365 to help you understand the unique needs of organization security requirements and review granularity of access control, administrative ease, and impact on scalability. This workshop helps the solution architect collect the correct information from customers by asking the right questions through assessing needs and looking at different aspects of their designed security model.

Integration design

One strength of Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform is the offering of many integration opportunities. For successful integration between systems, you need to ensure that the design has purpose and review. The purposes of the integration design review are to:

  • Drive communication and understanding – The review is designed to drive a conversation about overall plan for integrations and design aspects of specific interfaces by going through overall integration strategy, integration patterns, and middleware selection (if a middleware is used), and by thoroughly investigating specific business critical integration scenarios, monitoring and alerting approach, and any Microsoft 365 integrations.

  • Identify risks and issues – By taking a broad but high-level look at the integration aspect of the solution, it is possible to identify issues and risks with the integration design or implementation approach that will negatively impact the outcome.

Dual-write implementation

The purposes of the Dual-write implementation workshop are to:

  • Drive understanding on how dual-write will be used in the customer scenario – The Dual-write implementation workshop is designed to drive a conversation about how different apps will integrate by using dual-write.

  • Identify risks and issues– By taking a broad, but high-level look at the solution, it is possible to identify issues and risks with the solution design or implementation approach that will negatively impact the outcome.

  • Identify or discuss gaps – Identify areas where dual-write might not be fit for the purpose, and discuss identified gaps and alignment with the dual-write roadmap.

Solution performance

The Solution performance workshop provides guidance and best practices for solution design in respect to performance. The workshop will increase awareness of the impact that certain types of configuration and/or customization have on the overall performance and user experience. This workshop will also emphasize the importance of having defined performance goals and having the right focus on performance and performance testing during the entire project life cycle.

The purposes of the Solution performance workshop are to:

  • Evaluate planning and readiness activities for conducting meaningful performance testing.

  • Collect requirements and design for the project that might ultimately impact performance or areas that are already identified as problem areas.

  • Identify targeted sections of the solution. Enterprise solutions tend to be broad. The intent is not to cover every feature of your solution but to target the areas that will create the most impact for users.

  • Define clear goals and objectives and use the appropriate tools and processes for implementing performance testing.

Cutover strategy

The Cutover strategy workshop is designed to ensure that the cutover strategy provides a good approach and plan to deliver a well-defined, well-tested, reliable, and safe transition from current systems to the new production systems.

The goals of the Cutover strategy review are to:

  • Drive communication and understanding – The review is designed to drive a conversation about the multiple aspects of cutover across the various business and technical teams. The cutover has significant components that the business teams need to own and drive beyond the technical data migration tasks, and the workshop helps to ensure that the goals, planning, and approach are aligned and well-understood from the beginning.

  • Identify risks and issues – By starting with a review of the overall cutover vision and strategy at an early stage, you can identify risks early. The cutover reviews during the implement phase are designed to identify risks to keeping the cutover milestones on track and ready for final go-live cutover.

Post go-live strategy

The goal of the overall Success by Design framework is to ensure a successful customer outcome for each implementation.

The purposes of the Post go-live workshop are to:

  • Review project goals and lessons learned – Following the go-live event, reviewing the project goals achievement against success measures will help you determine if project adjustments are necessary, and the reflection on the lessons learned will prevent past issues from reoccurring.

  • Provide feedback on Dynamics 365 and the FastTrack program – Providing candid feedback will allow the solution and the FastTrack program to be improved.

  • Deliver insights on the next implementation phases – Sharing what’s next for the project/program after go live will allow a global understanding of where the digital transformation is heading.

  • Review support plans – Having a clear escalation path with the appropriate support plan for post go-live issues will allow an optimal time-to-resolution for all future incidents.

  • Review the customer advocacy program – Joining the customer advocacy program will ensure a strong connection with the Microsoft Dynamics 365 product team and the Dynamics 365 community.

  • Wrap up with a FastTrack graduation – The Post go-live workshop wraps up the FastTrack engagement.