Overview for implementation workshops to provide guidance for solutions

Implementation workshops provide timely guidance across the functional, technical, and implementation aspects of the solution.

Data migration strategy

Best practices to avoid data migration performance issues, understanding of business goals, and awareness on realistic throughput.

Agenda topics:

• Migration strategy and general information
• Data volume
• Tooling
• Network latency
• Performance
• Multithreading
• Testing

Mandatory attendees are solution architects and technical leads. Recommended attendees include key stakeholders from the customer and partner teams.

Security model design

Understand the unique needs of organization security requirements and review granularity of access control, administrative ease, and impact on scalability.

Agenda topics:

• Basics and security model overview
• Business units and teams
• Implemented security mechanism
• User interface
• Scalability, performance, maintainability
• Security testing
• Security monitoring
• Regulations and compliance
• Security beyond Dynamics 365

Mandatory attendees are solution architects and technical leads. Recommended attendees include stakeholders from the customer and partner teams.

Solution performance

Assess different areas of the solution that could impact the overall performance. Evaluate the strategy for performance testing to identify and address issues.

Agenda topics:

• Project plan
• Volumes
• Geolocation strategy
• Key business scenarios
• Performance testing

Mandatory attendees are solution architects, functional leads, project manager, technical leads, and test leads. Recommended attendees include stakeholders from the customer and partner teams.

Integration design

Review and discuss various integration scenarios and considerations with Dynamics 365 and other systems.

Agenda topics:

• Integration strategy
• General information
• Office 365
• Microsoft Power Platform
• Azure
• External systems
• Reporting

Mandatory attendees are solution architects, functional leads, and technical leads. Recommended attendees include stakeholders from the customer and partner teams.

Data model design

To review the envisioned data model for the customer project. The data model reflects the functional scope and potential complexity of the project.

Agenda topics:

• Entity relationship diagram
• Out-of-the-box versus custom entities
• Entity configuration
• Option sets, custom entities, and localization
• Security, relationships, and performance
• Fields: alternate keys, calculated, and rollup
• Auditing
• External data display or integration
• User experience

Mandatory attendees are solution architects, functional leads, and technical leads. Recommended attendees include stakeholders from the customer and partner teams.

Test strategy

Ensure the customer has planned for the various testing activities throughout the project lifecycle to ensure quality of their solution.

Agenda topics:

• Testing strategy and schedule
• Unit and functional test strategy
• System integration test strategy
• Data migration validation test strategy
• User acceptance test strategy
• Performance test strategy
• Security test strategy
• Regression test strategy
• Mock cutover test strategy
• Tools

Mandatory attendees are solution architects, functional leads, and technical leads. Recommended attendees include stakeholders from the customer and partner teams.

User experience design

Identify key goals and design elements the customer is leveraging to deliver an optimal user experience.

Agenda topics:

• Ease of use – legacy system mapping
• Ease of use – simplicity/efficiency
• Aesthetics – ISV alignment
• Aesthetics – corporate branding
• Performance – speed
• Consistency of experience

Mandatory attendees are solution architects, functional leads, and technical leads. Recommended attendees include stakeholders from the customer and partner teams.

Application lifecycle management strategy

Understand how the partner plans to go about the process of building, testing, validating, and deploying the solutions.

Agenda topics:

• General strategy
• Build plan
• Test strategy
• Release/deploy
• Run model (post-implement enhance/maintain)
• Storage management

Mandatory attendees are solution architects, functional leads, and technical leads. Recommended attendees include stakeholders from the customer and partner teams.

Gap solution design

This workshop is meant for implementations that have critical requirements not supported by the standard system out of the box. The purpose is to spend time reviewing the top gap solutions for high-impact, high-risk extensions to provide guidance on maximizing the use of standard features, alignment to product roadmap, and general design guidance. This workshop isn't intended as a fit/gap review. The expectation is that initial consideration of solutions for every scenario will be completed prior to the workshop.

Agenda topics:

• Identify and review the main gap requirements
• Discuss proposed solution for each selected gap
• Identify and discuss any potential risks
• Brainstorm alternative solution, ISV or workaround
• Review all gaps and potential dependencies

Mandatory attendees are solution architects, functional leads, and technical leads. Recommended attendees include stakeholders from the customer and partner teams.

Cutover strategy

Ensure that the cutover strategy provides a good approach and plan to deliver a well-defined, well-tested, reliable, and safe transition from current systems to the new production systems.

Agenda topics:

• Cutover vision and strategy
• Cutover project plan
• Go-live cutover plan
• Post go-live plan

Mandatory attendees are cutover lead, solution architect, data migration lead, and project manager roles. Recommended attendees include stakeholders from the customer and partner teams.

Post go-live

Review the key accomplishments, lessons learned, and constructive feedback from the implementation following the go-live to identify adjustments to the project delivery and operations support for the next phases of the digital transformation journey with Dynamics 365.

This graduates the implementation and marks the closure of the FastTrack engagement.

Walk through the opportunities offered with the Customer Advocacy Program to join the Dynamics 365 community and share the implementation team deployment success story.

Agenda topics:

• Key accomplishments: review of goals and objectives
• Discussion of lessons learned
• Post go-live assessment
• Looking forward
• Your Microsoft account team
• Microsoft Dynamics 365 support options
• Microsoft Customer Advocacy Program

Mandatory attendees are project managers and architects. Recommended attendees include the project sponsors from the customer and partner teams.

Business intelligence and analytics design

Ensure that the customer's design for providing business intelligence and analytics capabilities in the solution makes use of the best available technologies and patterns and is in line with the product roadmap.

Agenda topics:

• Operational reporting design
• BI process requirements
• BI team structure
• Data sources and aggregation
• Data storage
• Data model
• Portals and dashboards
• Volumes

Mandatory attendees are solution architects, functional leads, and technical leads. Recommended attendees include stakeholders from the customer and partner teams.

Note

The series of implementation workshops to be executed for any program will be determined by the solution architect running the Success by Design program following the Solution Blueprint Review. The typical format is a one-to-three-hour meeting on Microsoft Teams, but duration may vary based on the level of complexity. The preceding list is not meant to be exhaustive, but a high-level description to demonstrate the principles of implementation workshops.