Initiatives

3 Initiatives

Initiatives Overview

Use this topic to understand what initiatives are and how you create and manage them.

An initiative is a collection of all the catalog definitions. You manage the lifecycle status of all catalog entities using initiatives. Initiatives help you define and test the proposed changes in isolation from other unrelated initiatives.

For example, in design, you create multiple catalog entities. After you have created these catalog entities, you need a way to test them together. To test all these entities, you can associate them to an initiative and then publish the initiative into a testing environment. This saves you time to individually push your catalog entities into testing. When you move an initiative to a testing environment, the application moves the status of all the related entities into the In Test status.

After you have finished your testing, you can make the initiative active. This action moves all the catalog entities into a production run-time environment and the status changes to the next available lifecycle status.

For example, let's say a market opportunity motivates a marketing product manager to start a new offer initiative for Spring Season. The marketing manager is assisted by the service domain specialist and by the product manager to define the content of the initiative. Further, the buying, revenue, and the billing specialists join briefly to assist with testing. Finally, the sales marketing manager takes over the initiative ownership through roll out. The service domain specialist introduces a new set of service features and enables them for commercialization. Further, the marketing product manager joins to test and to learn about the new service features. Later, the marketing product manager introduces a series of commercialization initiatives to address market opportunities for the new service features.

Note:

When you create or edit entities, the in-design entities available for selection within the fields on the page are in context of the initiative you specify on that page. For example, when you create offers, the product specifications drop-down list will contain only those in-design specifications that are associated to the initiative specified on the page.
If the offer and the initiative being cloned are still in design, then the initiative can't be changed. Please retry with all the entities in the active state.

Related Topics

Create an Initiative

Here's how you create an initiative.

Go to Administration > Initiatives and click Create.
On the New Initiative page, enter the name and description. The ID is automatically generated for you.
Specify whether the initiative requires approval.
Click Create.

Your initiative is now created and listed on the Initiatives page. By default, a newly created initiative will be in the In design state. You can now associate catalog entities to this initiative.

Manage Initiatives

The initiatives that you have created are listed on the Initiatives page, where you can view and edit, manage lifecycle statuses, and approvals for your initiatives.

View Initiatives

Select View from the ellipses menu to view an initiative. On the View Initiatives page, you can see details about the initiative including the following:

Initiative details with the basic information.
All the product offers and entities that are included in an initiative.
Publishing activities that an initiative has gone through. You can also see the different spoke systems where this initiative was published and the publish status of the initiative in those spoke systems.

Edit Initiatives

Click ellipses and then select Edit to edit an initiative. When you're in the scope of editing an initiative you can update the name and description of the initiative.

Manage Lifecycle Status

You can update the lifecycle status of an initiative from the ellipses menu on the list page. Select the lifecycle status and click Confirm to change the status.

When you click Confirm, it implies that all the changes that you have made to the initiative are in design complete and you're ready to move the initiative to the next lifecycle status. Also, once you click Confirm for an initiative, you can no longer edit the contents of the initiative, as they become read-only.

Seek Approvals Using Initiatives

Optionally, you can mandate approvals for offers associated to an initiative. For more information about offer approvals, see Manage Offer Approvals.

Publish Initiatives to Spoke Systems

Use this topic to know how you can publish an initiative to the spoke systems.

You can use an initiative to publish multiple run-time catalogs to the spoke systems. When you publish an initiative, all the entities within it are published. You define your catalog, push to a test environment, validate the product offer, and finally publish to a production environment.

Here's how you can publish your initiatives when you haven't set any approval process:

On the Initiatives page, select the initiative that you want to publish.
Click Confirm from the actions menu. This moves the initiative and its entities to Ready to Publish status.
Click Publish from the actions menu. This option is available only if your initiative is in the Ready to Publish status.

If you have set an approval process, here's how you can publish your initiatives:

On the Initiatives page, select the initiative that you want to publish.
Click Confirm from the actions menu. This moves the initiative and its entities to Design Complete status.
Click Initiate Approval from the actions menu.

Your approver gets a notification for the approval request and you receive a confirmation message that your approval process is now initiated. Your approver may approve, reject, or add a comment for your request. You can check the status of your initiative from the initiatives list view page. If your request has been approved, the status changes to Ready to Publish state.
Click Publish from the actions menu. This moves the initiative and its entities to Launched status.

The initiatives and entities are published and moved to an external application. So, from an In Design state, you can move the initiative to a test environment. Once testing is complete, the initiative progresses through its lifecycle. The publish process is driven by the lifecycle statuses. The destinations are automatically identified based on the lifecycle entry configuration. After you have published your initiatives, go to the Publish Tracker to see the status of the published initiatives.