Roles and project phases

Transcript

Hi. Let’s review the roles and phases in a typical Adobe Experience Platform project, so you have a sense of the scope of what’s involved. The key responsible parties and the key outcomes in each phase. The key roles typically involved in a successful use of platform are a company leader, a project lead, and an enterprise architect, a data architect, a data engineer, data steward, marketers, data analysts, data scientists, and application developers. The phases of a project include the planning phase, the implementation phase, the use phase, and the grow phase. Let’s go through the project phases and discuss how each role gets involved.

During the planning phase, the company leader, typically an upper level business sponsor, needs to provide some overarching business objectives and direction for the project. There should be a project lead at your company who have reports to the company leader who defines these requirements. More specifically, who keeps tabs on the project to make sure that the team’s work is aligned to the business goals. Both of these roles typically aren’t hands on in the platform interface. Key role during the planning phase is the Enterprise Architect. The Enterprise Architect is an Adobe consultant or one of our partners who is there to make sure that platform fits into your company’s technology and business ecosystem so you can get the most value. The Enterprise Architect will need to meet with people in all of the other roles listed earlier, to make sure they understand your tech stack and business goals. During the planning phase, the Enterprise Architect will help you document your business objectives and measures of project success. They’ll also develop an implementation architecture to guide you through the later phases of the project. Once your company’s business objectives and implementation plan are complete, you can move into the implementation phase. The data architects and the data engineers are the critical roles in this phase. There is a lot of work that goes on in this phase, but the key outcomes are that your real time customer profiles are working as expected, and the data lake contains the expected data and can be queried. The data architects and data engineers need to work closely during this phase and be in frequent contact. It’s a real partnership and the boundaries can sometimes be a little fuzzy between who does what. But let’s go deeper into the tasks involved. The data architects need to model all the incoming data into schemas built using the experience data model. To do that, they’ll need to meet with the owners of these various systems to understand the data at a granular level, especially the fields that represent identities. So they can model each individual field consistently across the organization. Once the data architects have created the schemas and necessary documentation, the data engineers can create the data sets and start sending the data into platform. There may be multiple data engineers involved with different specialties. For example, one data engineer might specialize with ETL vendors and API methods, while another data engineer may specialize in JavaScript or mobile implementations using experience platform launch. Meanwhile, the data architect and the data steward should be meeting to discuss the governance, which dual labels should be attached to which fields, and which data usage policies are needed. Who should have access to which features and platform? The data engineer will need to be involved in discussions about how access and delete requests will be honored for GDPR and CcpA legislation, and how consent management needs to be implemented with certain data sources. Typically, the data steward is connected to your company’s legal team. Their job title might be something like controller, Chief Privacy Officer, Privacy Analyst, Legal counsel, etc. they should be bringing to the table the legal, contractual and usage requirements that the data architect can then implement in platform. Once the data is flowing into the data lake and the real time customer profile, it needs to be validated by both the architects and the engineers, usually using query service. And of course, all of this work should be done in a development sandbox before migrating and testing further in staging and production environments. Once the implementation phase is done, it’s time for the marketers, data analysts, and data scientists to step up in the use phase. The application developers have a role here too. The key outcome here is to deliver the business value that you set out to achieve in the planning phase. The marketers can start to configure and use platform services such as real time customer data, platform journey orchestration and customer AI. They can create segments and confirm that the resulting audiences appear in other Adobe applications, such as target Audience Manager Campaign, and AD Cloud. Data analysts can configure and use customer journey analytics and attribution AI, and work with data engineers to extract platform data into business intelligence tools. They can start using Query Service to directly access the data lake as well. Data scientists can start using query service as well and build, train and operationalize models in data Science workspace, collaborating with marketers to come up with data science applications that will drive business value. The data architect will probably be the best person to reach out to with questions about the data and platform, and what it means. You’re probably planning on using platform data and proprietary systems, or not Adobe Systems. An example would be pulling real time customer profile data into your call center system. The application developer gets involved in these types of tasks, and can work with the data engineer to extract the data out of platform and use it in those other systems. Making sure to enforce the data usage policies as you do so, the data engineer might be developing the queries to pull the data in, while the application developer incorporates that data into the UI. The data steward will be making sure that data usage policies are being enforced. Customer privacy is being respected and regulatory requirements are being followed. And of course, all along this journey, your enterprise architect from Adobe or one of our partners as well as Adobe Customer Support is there to help you overcome obstacles and get value out of platform. The project lead at this point will be reporting to the company leader the smashing successes that the team is having and working with the enterprise architect to come up with new strategies. As your organization grows with Adobe Experience platform. So that’s an overview of the roles and phases of an experienced platform project. You should now have a sense of the scope of these projects, what your role is and who you’ll need to work with to be successful.