Service Panel Project - Requirements Gathering

A SoftwareIDM customer project typically begins with customer training and requirements gathering. For deploying Service Panel, you will want to attend a W812 workshop. 

Before attending a W812 workshop, you will need gather some organization information. You will need to identify your Service Panel Audiences, Service Panel functionality groupings, and pair those with each audience. This will outline who is accessing the portal, and what functionality will be provided. If you need assistance understanding Service Panel Audiences and functional groups, you will want to attend course T711 - A Tour of Service Panel. 

Requirements gathering advance prep:

1. Identify audiences and broad functionality mapping: recommend 2 to 4 audience/function pairs for initial deployment, with up to 3 additional audience/function pairs for second iteration (not initial planning session)
2. Identify key stakeholders (expected to be present for planning workshop). May include members of audiences as well as people responsible for the service experience of people in the audiences.

 Functionality categories:

 Virtual Identity / white pages / search and lookup

• Service forms / self-service actions / account management
• Track & Trace / Change validation and notification

 Common audiences:

• Help Desk
• Administrators
• HR
• Managers
• Department / Site managers
• Auditors
• General users

 Example audience/function pairs:

 End user self-service action for common request item

• Manager/end user account search and user details view (org or white pages search)
• Help desk account creation wizards
• Account termination track and alert for auditors

Process Overview

Requirements gathering goes through the following aspects of a Service Panel deployment, typically collecting the data in a spreadsheet. A sample spreadsheet is included with the M950 course materials.

Time needed for requirements gathering depends on project scope. A simple Service Panel deployment may be plotted out in a single day. A more full-featured project (such as a complete MIM Portal replacement/substitute) will typically require 2-5 days to collect requirements.

1. Determine what Identity Panel providers will be needed to provide desired views and form actions (e.g. Active Directory, MIM, Azure Graph, SQL etc.). If deploying Identity Panel as part of the project, complete data collection for Identity Panel including provider connection settings, permissions, desired health checks, Identity Panel workflows, reports, etc.
2. Identify theme requirements, including color hex values and collecting a logo file and determining application title and custom domain.
3. Identify localization requirements: what languages will be implemented, and who will perform translations.
4. Collect details on audiences and actions. What roles will be present, and what will people in those roles be able to accomplish with Service Panel. Break requirements into individual actions and stories: e.g. Everyone can search for people (with filtering to exclude non-normal user accounts), or HR/Admins can create a Full Time Employee. Once actions are identified, collect as much detail as possible about how the action will be implemented:
   1. Whether it is a single form or multiple forms
   2. What permissions are applied to the form and whether there are sub-permission definitions
   3. What data needs to be collected from the user
   4. What data will be surfaced as labels for context
   5. What data will be generated and previewed (perhaps on a summary page)
   6. What ID fields (e.g. sAMAccountName, DN, employeeID) need to be read off a user identity and bound to hidden labels to provide context for update actions
   7. What workflow actions will occur when the form is submitted. Which systems will be updated, will there be notifications, etc.
5. Design virtual silos
   1. What attributes will be displayed, who can see which attributes, where will the data be sourced from
   2. Are there any non-data attributes, like hyperlinks to edit forms, etc.
   3. Which attributes will be displayed on which views (list, card, detail, thumbnail).
   4. For each attribute, is there any special formatting or decorators applied? Hyperlinks, labels, icons, photos, triggers for form actions etc. For multi-value reference attributes what display mode is chosen?