Operationalizing the DAP Project Lifecycle

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Brief Overview

Whether your company prefers an agile or waterfall project management approach, defined phases or milestones with entry and exit criteria are critical. A standardized process to record critical technical and tactical aspects of the project allows the Center of Excellence (CoE) to deliver a consistent, repeatable experience. 

Additionally, as your CoE works with stakeholders past the initial go-live on Projects 2-x, a standard project methodology will ensure up-front expectation-setting and accelerated time to value. 

The DAP Project Lifecycle

For a deeper dive, enroll in the free WalkMe Program Manager I – Program Manager Essentials course in the Digital Adoption Institute. 

Initiate

In this first phase, the project as a whole will be initiated. Once the intake form has been received, follow with an intake meeting. This allows the CoE to speak with the requestor to understand needs and requirements for the project. Here you may also develop a business objective and generate use cases. 

Plan

The Project Lead will conduct opportunity discovery to understand the desired output followed by conducting solution discovery. During solution discovery you’ll spend time determining which solutions can fill current gaps. The last part of this phase includes determining key stakeholders for the project.

Execute & Lead

In this phase, you will be managing the DAP Team and their work to complete the project. This will require you to use skills and tools that allow for prioritization and delegation of tasks. It is also in this phase where you will see the biggest lift with risk mitigation.

Go-Live

We’ve initiated the project, completed development, and it is now time to prepare our solutions for publishing. In this phase, typically, you’ll assign stakeholders to troubleshooting, QA, and UAT testing roles. Once the solutions are packaged up and ready for deployment, they are then published.

Analyze

After a period of time passes where the solutions are in production, you’ll then begin to evaluate the success of the solutions. You’ll measure baseline metrics against solution performance and use this data to understand the value of what your project has created. 

Optimize 

WalkMe is not a set-it-and-forget-it solution. In this phase, focus on a data-driven approach to evaluating current implementations. Is the content getting the expected engagement? What do we need to adjust so the engagement can improve? Have any workflows changed since our last content edit? Have our business objectives and focuses changed? 

Example Standard Operating Procedure for Project Stages