Adobe Analytics Requirements and SDR in Workspace – Part 4

Last week, I shared how to calculate and incorporate your business requirement completion percentage in Analysis Workspace as part of my series of posts on embedding your business requirements and Solution Design in Analysis Workspace (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3). In this post, I will share a few more aspects of the overall SDR in Workspace solution in case you endeavor to try it out.

Updating Business Requirement Status

Over time, your team will add and complete business requirements. In this solution, adding new business requirements is as simple as uploading a few more rows of data via Data Sources as shown in the “Part 2” blog post. In fact, you can re-use the same Data Sources template and FTP info to do this. When uploading, you have two choices. You can upload only new business requirements or you can re-upload all of your business requirements each time, including the new ones. If you upload only the new ones, you can tie them to the same date you originally used or use the current date. Using the current date allows you to see your requirements grow over time, but you have to be mindful to make sure your project date ranges cover the timeframe for all requirements. What I have done is re-uploaded ALL of my business requirements monthly and changed the Data Sources date to the 1st of each month. Doing this allows me to see how many requirements I had in January, Feb, March, etc., simply by changing the date range of my SDR Analysis Workspace project. The only downside of this approach is that you have to be careful not to include multiple months or you will see the same business requirements multiple times.

Once you have all of your requirements in Adobe Analytics and your Analysis Workspace project, you need to update which requirements are complete and which are not. As business requirements are completed, you will update your business requirement SAINT file to change the completion status of business requirements. For example, let’s say that you re-upload the requirements SAINT file and change two requirements to be marked as “Complete” as shown here in red:

Once the SAINT file has processed (normally 1 day), you would see that 4 out of your 9 business requirements are now complete, which is then reflected in the Status table of the SDR project:

Updating Completion Percentage

In addition, as shown in Part 3 of the post series, the overall business requirement completion percentage would be automatically updated as soon as the two business requirements are flagged as complete. This means that the overall completion percentage would move from 22.22% (2/9) to 44.44% (4/9):

Therefore, any time you add new business requirements, the overall completion percentage would decrease, and any time you complete requirements, the percentage would increase.

Using Advanced Segmentation

For those that are true Adobe Analytics geeks, here is an additional cool tip. As mentioned above, the SAINT file for the business requirements variable has several attributes. These attributes can be used in segments just like anything else in Adobe Analytics. For example, here you see the “Priority” SAINT Classification attribute highlighted:

This means that each business requirement has an associated Priority value, in this case, High, Medium or Low, which can be seen in the left navigation of Analysis Workspace:

Therefore, you can drag over items to create temporary segments using these attributes. Highlighted here, you see “Priority = High” added as a temporary segment to the SDR panel:

Doing this, applies the segment to all project data, so only the business requirements that are marked as “High Priority” are included in the dashboard components. After the segment is applied, there are now three business requirements that are marked as high priority, as shown in our SAINT file:

Therefore, since, after the upload described above, two of those three “High Priority” business requirements are complete, the overall implementation completion percentage automatically changes from 44.44% to 66.67% (2 out 3), as shown here (I temporarily unhid the underlying data table in case you want to see the raw data):

As you can see, the power of segmentation is fully at your disposal to make your Requirements/Solution Design project highly dynamic! That could mean segmenting by requirement owner, variable or any other data points represented within the project! For example, once we apply the “High Priority” segment to the project as shown above, viewing the variable portion of the project displays this:

This now shows all variables associated with “High Priority” business requirements.  This can be useful if you have limited time and/or resources for development.

Another example might be creating a segment for all business requirements that are not complete:

This segment can then be applied to the project as shown here to only see the requirements and variables that are yet to be implemented:

As you can see, there are some fun ways that you can use segmentation to to slice and dice your Solution Design! Pretty cool huh?