Most people who’ve run a sizeable IT project expect to pay for discovery for certain projects, including Dynamics 365 ones. What they’re less often told is what they should get for the money.
That matters, because discovery reports vary a great deal. The stronger ones become the foundation for the whole project. The weaker ones describe how the supplier usually works rather than how you do.
There’s also usually someone higher up in the organisation who’ll ask why you’re spending money on a project before anything’s been decided. It’s a fair question, and the best answer is being able to say exactly what you’ll have in your hands at the end.
What to expect from Dynamics 365 discovery, whoever does the work.
A picture of how you actually work
We don’t mean the process map from a manual. We mean the real version of your processes, with the workarounds, the double entries, the spreadsheets that run more than they should and the step that everyone skips.
The test is simple: show the report to somebody who does the job. If they read it and say, “well, that’s how it’s supposed to work”, it isn’t finished yet.
A distinction between phase one and everything else
What’s going to be implemented first, what’s waiting for later, and what isn’t happening at all.
That last part matters as much as the first. It’s where expectations are managed, and that’s far better done in a meeting room in month one than in a testing session in month six.
A number, with assumptions
You should come away with a costed scope, and the assumptions behind it. Something with details of the integrations, the tidy-up of the data, and the extent to which you’ll be using Dynamics 365 straight out of the box.
That’s what makes the number useful. You can see which assumptions you’d challenge, and roughly what happens if one of them turns out to be wrong. A figure on its own, with no detail, is very hard to defend.
An honest account of your data
Hopefully somebody has opened your old system and carried out a thorough evaluation. We mean aspects such as how many records there are, where the data quality issues lie and which records are worth migrating to the new system.
If the data section of the report has multiple items marked “to be confirmed”, discovery hasn’t finished. Finding that out was one of the main things you were paying for.
Every integration, with a name next to it
A list of every system Dynamics 365 will need to talk to and, for each one, who owns it on your side and who looks after it on the vendor’s.
Integrations rarely go wrong because the technology is hard. They go wrong in the gap between the new system and third party suppliers.
Names on your side of the table
A couple of months ago, we wrote an article about the people required from your organisation: someone who can make decisions, someone who knows why the data is the way it is, the people who’ll test it, someone to own it after go-live, and a sponsor who’s still interested months down the line. Discovery is the point where those roles should get real hours against them.
The risks
We don’t mean a table of generic risks. We mean the three or four things most likely to knock your particular project off course, and what’s being done about each one.
A fair test: if the risk list could be pasted into somebody else’s project without changing a word, nobody has thought hard enough about yours.
The test of your Dynamics 365 discovery report that matters most
Could you take what you’ve been given to a different supplier and use it?
If you could, you’ve bought something worth having. If it only makes sense in the hands of the people who wrote it, you’ve paid for a very long sales meeting. That’s the standard we hold our own discovery work to, and it’s a fair one to hold anyone to.
Why it’s worth thinking about now
A lot of next year’s budgets are being finalised at the moment. Discovery is a far smaller and easier thing to get approved than a whole project, and it means that when the bigger request does go to the board, it goes with its workings attached rather than a hopeful figure.
If you’re weighing up discovery, with us or with anyone else, and you’d like to talk through what to ask for, we’re happy to have that conversation. And if you’ve already had a Dynamics 365 discovery report and you’re not sure it stands up, get in touch. We’ll tell you honestly what we think, including when we think it’s good.
