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6 Phases of the Sales Performance Management Delivery Model

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

SPM Delivery Model

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!

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SPM Delivery Model - Intro to Development Life Cycles

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The implementation of a sales performance compensation system requires several steps, which are often referred to as the “System Development Life Cycle” or SDLC.  These steps include project initiation, requirement gathering, design, building, testing, deploying and maintaining the application.  No question there.

Each company and often each client with whom I worked had a different flavor of such methodologies.  Some work better in some cases, some work better in others, and I feel like some work particularly well for SPM software integration.  Software vendors often also have some flavor of a development methodology which promises to deploy their solution more quickly, but often by taking shortcuts.

The “SPM Delivery Model”, is my own version of a methodology to deliver a sales performance management system on-time, on budget, and without any defects.  The idea is to follow a repeatable process to manage the system deployment. What drives the need for yet another delivery model is that with an SPM system, unlike other type of software applications, the input and outputs are usually well known; we have historical data, we have compensation plans, etc.  Using a linear “waterfall” model is the best way to run into problems too late in the process.  Following an agile methodology or a rapid prototyping methodology can result in poor design and re-usability issues.

At a high level, the SPM delivery model appears to follow the waterfall model for the requirement gathering and design phases, and then follows a an agile methodology and a test-driven methodology for the build and test phases, where each iteration is repeated for each compensation plan.  Once every iteration is done,  the waterfall flow resumes for UAT, deployment and change management.

I will describe this in more details in my next post.

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