Solution Delivery Environment

Understanding a solution delivery environment is an ever-changing challenge. Challenges come from every aspect of solutions delivery and will likely seem overwhelming at first. They might manifest from within and externally to a project, including externally to an organization. They might come from gathering requirements or dealing with conflicts among project constraints.

With so many imposing constraints and challenges, where does a team start? As depicted in Figure 6-1, commonly a team starts by trying to understand business pain point(s) to derive a set of business needs. As the needs are better understood and quantified, a team is better enabled to build and deliver a solution that meets those needs.

Figure 6-1. How does a team get from business need to delivered solution?

Many good ways might exist to handle these solution delivery challenges. Following is Microsoft's approach.