Use your demos to accelerate delivery
During a recent regional kick-off meeting, I was blown away by the range and depth of demos that were completed by our in-house Pega DemoX team. As a member of our Delivery Excellence team, it started me thinking. Do we really capitalize on the power of these demos, and reuse them to accelerate delivery? Or are we tempted to view them just as a predelivery asset which we then disregard and build something new?
On discussing this further with Andy Howell, Vice President of Solution Consulting in EMEA, it became clear that every demo and scenario is different, and so reuse isn’t always an immediate consideration, or always even possible. Andy kindly explained: ‘We try to make each demo experience unique to a client’s requirements, but there are definitely simple principles that we can follow when creating demo artefacts, that increase the likelihood that a demo can inform or be used by delivery to accelerate their implementations.’
Another big game changer here is the introduction of Pega Gen AI™ Blueprint, with which you can quickly collaborate on and design an application, before creating it in your environment. This helps you visualize your application upfront, which then helps inform the right story to tell through your demo. This process of capturing ideas also helps frame for the delivery team exactly what you are going to implement for the chosen workflow. This is particularly valuable if you are not yet able to import your initial Blueprint into your environment.
So if you are working on demos or building prototypes in Pega Platform™ to support your blueprints, what are these simple principles that can help make the assets you have invested in more valuable for the delivery team? Here are some tips from Diego García González, the Manager of DemoX:
Ultimately, being able to jump-start delivery is the goal, to enable the development team to accelerate time to value.
First up, as it is in your Blueprint, your application design should clearly identify the three main pillars of the application when modelled in App Studio:
- Case Lifecycles (with stages and steps)
- Personas/Channels
- Data along with possible interfaces
By adopting this principle, you start to show how the Blueprint will come to life and you create the basic structure, which can then be reused or created through the Blueprint import process into your own development environment.
Secondly, and this is an obvious one, you should use App Studio as much as possible, instead of Dev Studio. App Studio favors reusability and is the quickest way for the delivery team to accelerate the implementation, to keep it simple, and to make it easier for citizen developers to understand the underlying logic.
Data modeling is our next principle: data objects should be used to group and model related data. Avoid grouping unrelated properties or placing all properties under work classes. This dramatically reduces reusability.
Next is out-of the-box functionality. There is no need to replicate the default functionality that Pega Platform provides to help you build your products, as one of Pega’s strengths is enabling quick and simple implementation. Accelerated delivery relies on reusing the pre-built and pre-test capabilities of Pega Platform, and this includes both rules and data entries. On longer builds, re-use principles should also be considered, as they can materially help the re-usability of any assets created by the delivery team.
Naming convention best practices and guidelines should be followed when creating rules. The assets that you create should be carefully named to reflect their true functionality or business purpose, and not just quickly named just for use in the demo. Also, the casing (capitalization of the letters) should be consistent across all new rules that you create under the demo asset, and follow the same standard as the naming of the default assets.
Ruleset compartmentalization is another consideration. Place all newly created rules under dedicated rulesets, to make sure that the demo assets are isolated from your default assets. Doing that makes it relatively easy to come up with a Product file that enables easy migration to other environments.
Finally, configuration sets should be utilized for application settings and environment-specific configuration.
Of course, ensuring that your demo assets find their way into the hands of the delivery team is also important. Having a thorough handover from the team that completed scoping and landed on the proposed solution, to the team that is going to deliver it all, is crucial. Blueprint is a fantastic focal point for this conversation, as its visual capture features help bring your demo to life.
To summarize, all of these ideas can help you make your demo work become more reusable for the delivery team. And although Pega GenAI Blueprint has radically changed how new workflows can be designed and imported, during any Discovery phase demos still play a key role in showcasing functionality and exploring innovative ideas. Being able to harness this great work by providing a WRAP file to your delivery team, with your support context, is invaluable.
Related Resources
- AI Workflow Builder | Pega GenAI Blueprint
- Delivery Excellence with Pega Express | Pega Community
- Explore Pega product demos | Pega
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