D365 Finance & Operations ISV Solution Development Best Practices (Part-4) - Customer Implementation Readiness

Phase of Implementation & Execution                                                                                                  

Stage                                                                                                                                                                

Prospective Customer doing Implementation of D365 F&O and your ISV side by side

Prospective  Customer already had D365 F&O implemented and you are plugging in your ISV solution Add-On

Prospective Customer already using your ISV solution and now they are starting D365 F&O implementation

• Demo solution with latest D365 F&O release (April / October)
• Storyboarding / Mockup on any customer specific requirements to mimic end to end use cases
• Terminologies, Implementation Methodology collateral alignment with D365 F&O
• If time permits take sample from prospective customer of their products, vendors, sample transactions data and show in your demo
• Any upcoming your product roadmap and Microsoft roadmap combined value-prop.

• Get from customer their implemented D365 F&O version, and ask if Dual-write,  Dataverse, Data Lake, LCS Add-Ons are installed as those help in deciding certain integration options finetuning for implementation.
• Ask for customer D365 upgrade cadence so align implementation and support accordingly
• If time permits take sample from prospective customer of their products, vendors, sample transactions data and show in your demo
• Any upcoming your product roadmap and Microsoft roadmap combined value-prop.

• Show demo on sample data from customer and how your ISV work with D365 F&O
• Discuss what will be ideal stage of your involvement during customer D365 F&O implementation cycle / phase
• How master data will be managed (which system will be primary and which will be secondary)

• Agree on timeline, joint project management office(PMO) with customer and D365 implementation partner.
• Agree on change management process
• Agree on project contingencies for timeline, budget and requirements
• Who will host ISV solution and will it be provided as binaries / source code if applicable.

• Evaluate timeline of UAT / Testing / Cutover as those are mostly overlooked areas are these enough to smooth completion
• Agree on ownership of ISV IP and deployment responsibility (ISV / Customer / D365 Partner)
• Agree on Go Live Release version and what version you will support
• Clarify on who will provide and own Dev/Test sandboxes
• Setup weekly cadence with Customer and Implementation Partner
• Agree on communication channel and artifacts repository e.g. MS Teams / SharePoint to be used as well define how tasks are created, assigned and tracked e.g. in DevOps centrally for all stakeholders.
• Define and agree on templates like requirement documentation (MS Word or DevOps), Approval Authority, Weekly Status Reports, Design / Architecture artifacts, User Manuals etc.
• Define RACI matrix of tasks across all stakeholders for all phases of project.
• Evaluate and plan if FastTrack enrolled implementation and how and what milestones and artifacts to be reviewed with Microsoft FastTrack team

• Onboard team members on Statement of Work, Customer and Partner point of contacts, escalation hierarchy.
• Train on Task tracking and reporting tool like DevOps / AreaPaths and assignment SOP.

• All mentioned in left cell + following
• Get the walkthrough from Customer / D365 Implementation Partner on the implemented processes touching your ISV
• Get access to sandbox to validate and accustom to customer data and processes
• Define SOP of release deployments and responsibilities

• Plan and Prepare a separate sandbox for supporting current ISV production release and setup separate sandbox and release plan for upcoming integration / working with D365 F&O

• Recommended to do some initial joint requirement sessions with implementation partner, ISV team and customer  to grasp full business envisioning 
• Gather and document non-functional requirements as well
• How master data / data loading will be handled, who will cleanse / load data what is your requirements and dependency on data
• For integrations get projected transaction volumes per hour / per interface and projected growth expectations.
• Assess and discuss any security, privacy, globalization, regularity requirement.
• Do ask customer to start preparing business test cases this data can be used for sprint testing and later get on those use cases get UAT.

• Get existing process reviewed and prepare discovery questionnaire accordingly.
• Priority to find out any dependent process / data / information which you require to implement ISV is missing / incomplete or in-progress so to plan further actions and project activities accordingly.

• Start discussion and SOPs which will be primary system of Master records
• How transition period and activities will be handled until D365 F&O system is live

• Recommend to do cold start approach, let implementation partner come up with base design and ISV on top of it embed your design process as it will be time effective starting early will not close design unless base D365 F&O implementation design is finalized.
• Define clear data flows, request / response payloads definitions so all parties clear about business process flows, any breakage in edge case of business.

• Identify Customizations and integration enhancements and map in business process. 
• Make flow diagrams to ensure you capture data / information flow and let customer review business process use case  in case any scenario is broken.

• Update existing application business process flows with latest integration / extension touchpoints.
• How any data transformation if required will be done or mapping of data if required.

• Define Sprint Scope
• Follow naming convention and coding best practices in case some enhancements needed
• Use data templates to import / configure system. You can use sample data instead of full data load during sprint dev-test
• DevOps pipeline for deployments is recommended to be setup
• Document the steps to re-do in other environments later on
• Make sure not using Contoso environment for testing, it has to be on customer data to detect any issues as early as possible
• Create data scrubing scripts in case it is copied from one environment to another sensitive information to backup / restore to be cleared out.
• Proper testing of sprint to be done before marking task completed
• It is also recommended to create RSAT / Task Guide based test cases as well for regression testing
• Segregation of roles & responsibilities on environment setup
• Cross check testing against customer provided business test cases to validate and prepare
• Do bug triage and prioritization with all stakeholders
• For email / SMS / notification testing it is recommended to whitelist only customer domain and ISV domain to send and receive email block all other domains to avoid any lapse of accidental email notification to external contacts

• Perform UAT on D365 F&O and your ISV release which will be going to Production, do not plan any release update after it for production only exception is D365 F&O quality update / hotfix / platform update
• Start preparing UAT environment while doing Sprint development as first time setup takes time.
• Instead of isolated testing sessions, do joint ISV + D365 Implementation Partner led session and cover process by process and feature by feature.
• During UAT phase atleast 2 rounds of UATs are needed 
• Load as much data as possible during UAT to cover variety of scenarios
• UAT to be done in actual security role which be assigned to the user instead open security role
• In parallel if applicable performance testing to be conducted
• With UAT signoff / Conditional Signoff start setting up Pre-Prod / Production environment
• In case any open items left, define their workaround for go live until feature / fix been patched to production

• Show users differentiated experience what was previous SOP vs. what is new SOP so they get familiarized and adopt to new process 

• Define detailed cutover plan with time-fencing
• Have templates, data packages ready
• Assign roles, security to users on production environment as per SOP
• Agree on update release cadence with customer as well hotfix approval and deployment SOP
• Agree on any cutover / historical data load activities after go live

• Plan the Production window as well as rollback plan
• It is recommended to agree with customer that any BI / Reporting can be accessed after few days of Go Live so all team focus on transactional go live and BI solution processing and dashboards can be served to end users after some production data validation
• Smoke testing and main users go live testing to planned 
• Try to hold any postings of data as long as possible so to validate transactions as much before posting in production.
• Replicate production deployment to Pre-Prod / UAT in case some hotfix patch to be deployed or production issue to be reproduced and check for fixing.
• Do security scan of your SAAS application endpoints as well Security Audit for Security & Penetration testing
• Establish and agree support SOP and ticketing system as well severity / priority definitions with all stakeholders

• Plan the Production window as well as rollback plan especially As-Is process, in-flight transactions and To-Be process try to make impact as seamless as possible

• Keep the implementation team engaged so they can connect and resolve issues with users in quickest possible time
• Monitor performance and any bottlenecks to be logged for investigation

• Document lessons learned
• Start onboarding  / transitioning to support feature / module by module