Explain the importance of adopting and maintaining documented processes.

Explain the importance of adopting and maintaining documented processes.

• Improve the predictability of your implementations

• Standardize processes and operations across the organization

• Align with your competitive differentiators to determine the needs for your implementation

Why methodologies are important?

A correct sequence of tasks, and ensuring all required resources and artifacts are managed properly throughout the lifecycle of Finance and Operations apps, is essential for a successful implementation.

Any successful implementation usually consists of five major phases:

• Analysis

• Design and develop

• Test

• Deploy

• Operate

In the next units, you'll look at a summary of tasks in the implementation methodology. This will help you understand the overall phases of implementation. By collaborating with other project team members, you can better fulfill your duty and exceed the expectation of the customer to have a successful go-live.

Regardless of deployment topology, either on the cloud or on-premises, the methodologies are very similar. Even though a cloud implementation is a much more reasonable solution for a better total cost of ownership (TCO), some businesses might still choose to use on-premises.

Gathering and analyzing the requirements

When a customer requirement can't be achieved with out-of-the-box functionality of Finance and Operations apps, then you must start the analysis stage. When a requirement is a must-have, then you need to consider customization.

The focus of requirements collection should cover all the aspects of the existing business processes as well as the future state of business processes. The whole requirement gathering and understanding process is a highly scientific approach that needs expertise and the ability to give attention to details.

You must be able to describe the future state of business processes in Finance and Operations apps based on a proposed solution and comparing it with out-of-box functionality.

There must always be an explicit link between business processes and the requirements. It should start at a high level for the coverage perspective, but the requirements must be collected in detail.

• A business process is a collection of related, structural activities and requirements with interconnection among them, some of which can be represented in a flowchart comprising decision points and dependencies.

• A subprocess is a level in a business process for each business process function. Detailing business functions starts at this level. A subprocess could be dedicated to a single functional area or it could be a cross-functional area as well.

• A requirement is a series of activities, or steps within a subprocess. Organizations may leverage use case scenarios to explain the requirements clearly. A use case is a pattern of behavior and a sequence of related activities. Every organization must keep a goal of collecting the requirements as structured as possible.