Vendor Onboarding Under a Fixed 10-Week Window
Northwind Equipment Services has 10 weeks and a fixed budget to replace a 14-year-old vendor-onboarding process. The steering committee handed the team a 42-page requirements document covering 19 integrations, 7 approval levels, and a vendor scorecard. A previous 9-month waterfall attempt delivered no production release because the team tried to build all 42 requirements at once. The business sponsor is skeptical of another long design phase, but compliance insists that tax-ID validation, bank-account verification, and sanctions screening be in the first release. Six user groups are involved: procurement, legal, finance, compliance, vendor administrators, and external vendors. Vendor administrators currently spend 35 minutes per case re-keying data between email and spreadsheets. The CIO wants a working demo in 4 weeks and a production pilot in 10 weeks. The team has two Pega developers, one business architect, and limited compliance-SME availability. Stakeholders disagree about whether the vendor scorecard belongs in scope.
1. Using Pega Express, explain how you would shape the first release and what you would defer. Show how personas, microjourneys, and the minimum lovable product (MLP) idea drive the scope decision.
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Start from the primary personas: vendor administrators and procurement. Their microjourney is request, qualify, approve, and activate a vendor. Run discovery workshops to capture objectives and pain points, then map the 42 requirements to stages and steps. Compliance controls are non-negotiable first-release stages because without them the vendor cannot be activated. Defer the scorecard and the 7-level approval chain to Enhance unless a workshop proves they block the end-to-end path.
The MLP is a usable end-to-end path for one vendor segment, not a demo of every feature. The 4-week demo should show request → tax-ID validation → sanctions screening → bank verification → activation. The 10-week pilot should handle real vendors in two regions. This gives the sponsor visible value while keeping the backlog ordered by business outcome rather than document section.
2. The steering committee says the 42-page document is the backlog and questions the need for discovery workshops. How do you respond, and what artifacts would you produce before Build?
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Respond that the document lists features, not outcomes. It cannot tell the team which steps are mandatory for a compliant vendor activation, which personas perform them, or where exceptions occur. Without discovery, the team would translate every line into a rule and repeat the waterfall failure.
In Discover, produce personas, a microjourney map, a draft case lifecycle, a data object model, and a prioritized backlog with acceptance criteria. Trace each original requirement to a stage or step, or mark it deferred with a business reason. In Prepare, produce the application stack, integration inventory, environment plan, test approach, and release plan. Have compliance SMEs validate the tax, bank, and sanctions stages. Build then proceeds in short increments against the MLP, with the 42-page document used as a source, not as the backlog itself.