LeapComp - Sales Performance Management Blog

he SPM Delivery Model consists of 6 phases:
• Analyze
• Design
• Build
• Test
• Acceptance Test
• Deployment

SPM Delivery Model

Analyze Phase: The analyze phase consists of describing functional and non-functional requirements.  At the end of the implementation, we should be able to look at the system and confirm each requirement is met.

Design Phase: The design phase consist of planning how the system will meet the requirements.  The major deliverables include a functional design document (larger systems may have multiple such documents for each major component.  It will also consist of a solution design document, providing more details about the implementation.  This solution design should have “just enough” information.  Too little and the implementers will be left guessing and interpreting the design.  Too many details will cause the document to quickly become meaningless by not being kept up to date as the system evolves.  The design phase also includes planning the tests, and as I discussed before on this blog, to create test scenarios.

Build Phase: The build phase is repeated for each compensation plan, or for each major component which can stand alone and produce verifiable results.  Unlike a pure rapid prototyping methodology, it is a good idea to only start building when the requirements and design phases are well defined to ensure a strong design.  Unlike the waterfall model, this avoids a “big bang” approach, trying to integrate all plans at once over a long period of time and hoping everything will work.

Test Phase: Testing should be performed after every small build iteration, to ensure the use cases defined in the design phase work as expected.  This goes beyond unit testing and test multiple conditions and integration with previously developed plan.

Acceptance Test Phase: Once we are done developing and testing every plan, we are ready to put it all together and either load data from a previous month, or load the data with which we are going live.    This is where the stakeholders will agree and sign-off on the implementation.

Deploy: Go-live time!