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Starting off with EVA

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Starting off with EVA

All you need to know about running your first New Black project

Welcome to your first New Black project! The first few weeks we'll be there for you with kick-off sessions, meetings and workshops, ensuring you're up to speed with EVA in no-time. This document will outline how these weeks are likely to look like.

Kick-off​

To give you a proper start with EVA, we plan a two-day kick-off session. These can be arranged at our offices in Almere, at yours – wherever they may be – or remotely (although this option is discouraged, unless you are on the other side of the Earth).

The purpose of this session is threefold:

a) To give you a full crash course of what EVA does and how it works.
b) To do a basic, initial configuration of some key modules so that you can use them as examples when configuring your products, prices, organizational units, and so forth.
c) To meet the NewBlack SME and support team.

In order for these three goals to be achieved, we need you to invite to this session a few key players from your organization – ideally people with both technical understanding and business knowledge.

For point b) we’ll ask you to prepare a consistent list of products and prices before the session so that we have something to work with. Just reach out to your NewBlack project manager and they’ll set you up with the right person to get this processed beforehand.

Point c) is important because we are a fully flat organization, so depending on your needs and questions, you will end up interacting with many of us. And, since we’re all just as dedicated to the success of your project, it would be a shame for any faces to be foreign to you.

The Learning​

Once the kick-off has concluded, you’ll be ready to jump into the deep end with the key knowledge areas of EVA.

For this, we have prepared a set of standard workshops, as outlined below. Because the workshops include a large number of participants and a variety of SMEs, we’d recommend arranging these remotely. If you’d really like to have them in-person, we'll check what's possible.

Prep-work

Before each workshop, please try to clarify your AS-IS internal processes so that we do not spend precious time in the sessions determining how things work currently. Also, if you have any specific questions, please send them at least a day in advance so that we have time to prepare.

1. Users & Organization Units​

2. Pricing & Promotions​

3. Financial Exports​

4. Cash Management​

  • Duration: 45 minutes presentation & 45 minutes Q&A
  • Content: cash handling, day opening and closing, finance
  • SME: Alvar Piepers
  • Docs links key info:

5. Checkout & Products​

6. Logistics & Stocks​

7. Instore Logistics​

8. B.I. & Software Infra​

  • Duration: 1 hour presentation & 2 hours Q&A
  • Content: infrastructure, BI, pipeline, data lakes, integration with EVA, webhooks and events, data exports
  • SME: Max Reckers
  • Docs links key info:

9. Third-party Integrations​

10. Hardware Infrastructure​

  • Duration: 1 hour presentation & 1 hour Q&A
  • Content: in-store hardware, device set-up, device requirements, watchtower, offline support
  • SME: Max Reckers, Marco Heestermans
  • Docs links key info:

11. Stencil​

  • Duration: 30 minutes presentation & 30 minutes Q&A
  • Content: stencil
  • SME: Albert Visser
  • Docs links key info:

Generally, we recommend that these workshops be arranged withing a span of three or four weeks (4 or 3 per week).

We’re committed to supporting you from start to finish to ensure the success of the project. From our experience, it works best when you arrange the expert workshops from your end, as there are many more participants there than there are from NewBlack. Changes and exceptions can happen, so it’s handy to be able to see your key players’ agendas and make adjustments as required. We will provide you with our SMEs’ availabilities and help out wherever necessary to ensure that these sessions go smoothly and conclude successfully.

During these workshops we will be discussing many complex things which will have impact on your processes, business rules, systems, and potential architectural set-up. For this reason, it is important that in all workshops there is a person assigned by you to take notes in order to make better decisions afterwards. Some development tickets may be needed for EVA, so the better you write down the perceived gaps, the faster we can refine them.

We also recommend recording these sessions for those in your organization who cannot attend, and for later reference.

Optional items

If you like to hit the ground running, we've got some useful, but optional, lists for you:

  • An OpenAPI JSON with the most important items
  • A list of actions to be taken per each category to successfully configure EVA

Since both of these are complex and require the right context depending on the right timeline of the project, please reach out to your New Black PM for the right versions for you.

The Work​

So, you’ve participated in the workshops and got a much deeper understanding of how EVA works, and the work needed to configure your environment. After each workshop, there should be sufficient work that you can already do on EVA to advance the configuration and integration on your side.

The New Black Docs (where you are right now) are your best friends in this endeavor! Despite this, they may not always have all the information you’re looking for - please let us know so we can improve them.

As you work through these aspects, you may realize one of three things:

  • I need to know more about this!
    • If you encounter a topic that you’d like a deeper dive into, we can arrange that. Simply reach out to your New Black project manager and inform them of your need. They will help you arrange the session.
  • I don’t understand this!
    • If you’ve had the workshops, the deep dives, and have read the Docs from beginning to end, and are still unsure how something should be configured, or why something isn’t working, create a Help & Implementation ticket.
  • I don’t think this works like this!
    • It’s possible that EVA simply does not do a thing you’d like it to. This is what we’d call a gap and it may require Planning development.

The Questions​

We were just talking about the Help & Implementation tickets – a lovely bit of help which we provide via our Helpdesk website. Here you can create tickets in which you ask for help on the issues or difficulties you are facing.

An H&I ticket will be picked up and answered by one of our SMEs – whom you’ve met during the kick-off. Besides the SMEs, there is also a full team of back-end experts who may provide you with answers, should your questions be better covered by their expertise.

We have some guidelines for you to take into account when contacting support.

The Alignment​

During the work or the questions, either you or we may identify some things as being gaps. Should this happen, we’ll first need a quick alignment on the actual functionality you would need and if that's in line with our vision for EVA. If this is the case and we determine we need to do some development, then you will need to create a ticket in your own board on the New Black JIRA.

Once you have done so, an SME will read your ticket and determine if it needs any refinement. If yes, they’ll reach out to you to set up an SME Refinement session after which the regular development process will continue - all of which is described in our Planning development docs.

The Changes​

Depending on which part of EVA your development request touches, the when and how of its delivery differs. For a clear overview of these differences, check Handling releases.

The Access​

Last, but not least, it is important for you and all your key players to have access to the right tools, such as JIRA and Freshdesk. We'll provide you with this at the start, but afterwards you manage and/or request access yourself. For more information, click here to find out how to access the channels you'll be using on a day to day basis.

The Conclusion​

With this information you should have everything you need to get an excellent start to your project. Should you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out to your New Black project manager; the whole team here at New Black is behind you!