In this post within my series on solution architecture for the Power Platform we’ll talk about the more formal discovery phase of a project implementation which may fit in the broader ‘pre-sales’ and ‘requirements gathering’ phases in a sense and overlap between these. We’ll also cover what discovery actually is and how it doesn’t just fit into the two stages above.
We’ll look at some of the things solution architects should be focusing on in these areas and how to really maximise success by knowing your customer.
What is discovery?
So friends, let’s start by discussing what discovery actually is! Discovery is a bit of a consistently ongoing process of you getting to know your customer, their business problems and what they need in a solution. Guess what people, you won’t find everything out about the customer and all of their needs in those first couple of workshopping sessions you have with them! So… this is always a constantly ongoing process which you need to be VERY flexible to, and learn a lot from.
The best question
One of the best questions we can ask to truly understand business processes in an organisation is ‘Why?’. And this could be about anything friends, it could be ‘Why are we trying to automate this thing?’, or ‘Why does that button need to be there?’
As a solution architect, this will allow you to really understand what a customer is trying to resolve and achieve. It’s important that we don’t just discover a pre-defined solution from the customer with them telling us ‘I need an app for this thing’ etc… but instead we truly understand the business workflow as it currently exists, the problem and what we can do to resolve the issue. This will allow us to suggest potentially better solutions for the problem than those that the customer has already thought about.
Initial customer discovery
So let’s quickly look at an overview of what we should be doing during the first steps of a customer interaction and implementation that we might consider ‘discovery’. Now this is the stuff we should be doing when the customer potentially isn’t even one of ours yet but they’re just a potential lead.
This initial customer discovery should effectively be us going out to find information about the customer and their organisation. We’d look for things like their size, structure, values, mission statement and more to get a real understanding of their mission as an organisation, so we reflect their goals during our collaborative process together.
In the next blog post, we’ll dive more deeply into this, and some of the sources we can think of using to get a good picture of the customer.