Case study in environment planning

Let's see how a retailer learned from its mistakes and improved its environment planning with the help of the Microsoft FastTrack team.

The challenge

A multinational retailer wanted to implement Dynamics 365 Finance, Supply Chain Management, and Commerce in several phases over eight months. It set up an implementation project with the basic environments, services, and capacities that came with its subscription license. These included the production and sandbox environments and hosted build automation services.

However, the retailer's management team didn't realize that these resources were only enough to run the solution after it was deployed. They didn't have enough environments to do all the implementation activities they needed for their moderately complex rollout.

The solution

The retailer engaged the FastTrack team early in the implementation process. The FastTrack team reviewed the retailer's solution blueprint and discussed the deployment plans and risks with the retailer and its partner. They realized that the retailer's environment strategy was inadequate and suggested a deep-dive workshop on environment planning.

In the workshop, the FastTrack team explained that environment planning isn't a one-time task. It's an ongoing activity that requires close collaboration between key stakeholders. The team needs to plan the environments according to the project schedule and the purpose of each environment. They also need to review the environment plan regularly and adjust it as needed.

The retailer's project team created an environment plan that documented the different environments, their purpose, the project phase they were needed for, and how long they would be needed. They also identified key activities that might affect the environment plan, such as data migration, code deployment, and user acceptance testing. To make sure their environment plan stayed up to date, they scheduled regular reviews and updates as part of the project plan. This simple but important exercise helped the team feel confident that they understood and accounted for all the implementation requirements, and that they were ready to get the needed environments on time to meet all the milestones.

The development team also configured DevOps for multiple release branches, with a separate pipeline of sandboxes to support each go-live phase and ongoing maintenance.

The outcome

The retailer successfully implemented and rolled out the finance and operations apps across multiple countries and regions. It learned that timely environment planning was a critical factor in its success.