Hundreds, if not thousands, of books describe and define solutions delivery and its processes. The reasons so many books are written on the subject is because no one delivery model or process has yet met the needs of all projects. Each method provides a different perspective on how to balance team member productivity with team delivery predictability. Too little process might enable high initial productivity, but at the expense of low predictability and quality. Too much process might ensure predictability, but at a severe cost in productivity. So, what is the right balance for a project and for an organization?

As discussed in this chapter, a project team should select and adapt a solution delivery life cycle that best fits their needs within the bounds of their organizational guidelines. This involves their not only adapting life cycle guidance, but also understanding and adapting workflow, policies, templates, reports, permissions, and so forth. This, of course, is much easier for a project team if an organization has tools, templates, and guidance preconfigured and ready for adapting. Other factors that need to be considered include process maturity and tolerance of a team as well as maturity of technology being used. To start to determine which solution delivery life cycle will work best, a team needs to understand the environment(s) in which they must deliver their solution.

Solution Delivery Environment

Understanding a solution delivery environment is an ever-changing challenge. Challenges come from every aspect of solutions delivery and will likely seem overwhelming at first. They might manifest from within and externally to a project, including externally to an organization. They might come from gathering requirements or dealing with conflicts among project constraints.

With so many imposing constraints and challenges, where does a team start? As depicted in Figure 6-1, commonly a team starts by trying to understand business pain point(s) to derive a set of business needs. As the needs are better understood and quantified, a team is better enabled to build and deliver a solution that meets those needs.

Figure 6-1. How does a team get from business need to delivered solution?

Many good ways might exist to handle these solution delivery challenges. Following is Microsoft’s approach.