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.
- 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.