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The CIN Methodology for Implementation Projects – Your way to success

Juergen Sattler

ERP, Implementation, Lean and Agile

Your predictable way for successful Software Implementations

The CIN Methodology for Implementation Projects

Before we have a deeper look into the CIN Methodology, let us frame the definition on what makes a project successful:

Scope: The project delivers all the agreed-upon deliverables and outcomes, addressing all specified requirements.
Time: The project is completed within the allocated time frame.
Cost: The project stays within the allocated budget.
Quality: The project meets the defined quality standards and specifications.
Stakeholder Satisfaction: The needs and expectations of stakeholders, including clients, team members, and other interested parties, are satisfied.
Risk Management: Risks are effectively managed and mitigated throughout the project life-cycle.
Value and Benefits: The project delivers the expected benefits and adds value, contributing positively to the organization’s strategic objectives.
Team Satisfaction: The project team feels engaged, motivated, and recognized for their contributions.

In summary, a successful project is one that achieves its objectives, fulfills its purpose, and satisfies all stakeholders while adhering to agreed constraints and standards.

Our Methodology for Implementations consists of four different phases.

These phases do not have any overlap and each phase has a very precisely defined outcome.

With this defined outcome the next phase of the project is predictable as well.

Guide the customer

Initiate

In Initiate phase the project team helps the customer identify the future solution scope via best practices and detailed scope items.

We explain:

our methodology
the implementation template for the solution
the agile project management
the transparent delivery structure

The outcome of this phase defines the future scope and the expected size of the next phase, including the first estimation of the overall project size.

Common agreement on the scope

Discover

Within the six weeks’ Discover phase we prepare a proposed scope based on country and industry and on the best practices for the customer.

Prepare the workshop and define the scope items for the sessions with an initial proposed discovery status
Enhance the scope items based on country and industry best practices with customer specific information
Build the workshop agenda
Setup the workshop sessions and invite the corresponding business users from the customer side (based on the personas assigned to the scope items)
Conduct up to a two weeks’ workshop with the customer’s business experts to define what is in scope and out of scope.
Clarify open topics
Create a delivery execution plan and a detailed solution blueprint
Make a fixed price offer for the Deliver phase based on the defined scope

Execution based on the plan

Deliver

We execute Deliver phase in two weeks’ sprint cycles. The customer team is invited to our project management environment to achieve full transparency about the execution status.

After each sprint a “Show and Tells” session is organized to introduce new features and functions to the customer team. After the session the User Stories are handed over to the customer team for User Acceptance Test (UAT) with the manual test cases. The test cases are provided by the project team based on the acceptance criteria which are finalized by the customer upfront.
After successful UAT , the customer approves the deliverable of the User Stories and the project team delivers an automated test case to ensure the stability.
If the User Story does not meet the customer’s acceptance criteria, a bug ticket is created by the customer team and the corresponding User Story is reopened and assigned to the next sprint as a backlog.
The customer team as well as the project team can raise showstoppers and risks. Such showstoppers or risks are addressed to the project management team and within 24 hours the management team will respond with an action/mitigation plan. The process is completely transparent via the dashboards.
We measure customer and team satisfaction after each sprint via a customer satisfaction poll and show this rating real time within the dashboards available for all the members.
Via burn-down charts and velocity projections the status of the overall project status is always transparent, and required actions can be triggered immediately based on facts.

Ensure a smooth going live and ongoing support.

Set to Production/ Continuous Run

Before and after going live we assign a hypercare team to ensure a smooth transition.

If the customer is interested in further ongoing support, we offer an ongoing support subscription as well.

Within the ongoing support we manage release changes, continuous scope enhancements, and landscape adjustments based on new features and upcoming business requirements.

Let’s revisit the definition of what makes a project successful and map it to our methodology:

Scope: The project delivers all the agreed-upon deliverables and outcomes, addressing all specified requirements.

We have a clear scope in all the phases and very precise definition of all the deliverables within the project (including what is not in scope)
Time: The project is completed within the allocated time frame.

We execute Deliver phase in sprints with early warnings on missed deliverables and by proactively monitoring the progress to ensure to stay in timeline.
Cost: The project stays within the budget allocated.

We make a fixed-price project offer based on the solution blueprint.
Quality: The project meets the defined quality standards and specifications.

We manage quality with acceptance criteria, manual and automated test cases, and User Acceptance Tests executed by the customer.
Stakeholder Satisfaction: The needs and expectations of stakeholders, including clients, team members, and other interested parties, are satisfied.

We satisfy the needs and expectations with all the quality measures mentioned above and also with the satisfaction polls after each sprint.
Risk Management: Risks are effectively managed and mitigated throughout the project lifecycle.

We manage showstoppers and risks which can be raised by both the customer and the project team. They are addressed within 24 business hours.
Value and Benefits: The project delivers the expected benefits and adds value, contributing positively to the organization’s strategic objectives.

We define values and benefits (non tangible) together with the customer in the scope of the solution.
Team Satisfaction: The project team feels engaged, motivated, and recognized for their contributions.

We achieve such high engagement through the satisfaction poll per sprint, lean and agile project setup, full transparency of the project execution status and showstoppers & risks. The reporting is made only based on the results delivered by the team, and no traffic light reporting is used in independent tools.

I hope you got an overview about our methodology and philosophy on how to manage projects and ensure that we deliver based on our promises. Besides the very professional environment established to deliver based on our promise, I want to mention one more important topic:

our passion is to serve our customers and establish long term relationships

Interested in more details? http://www.cin-solutions.com

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