3 Initiatives

Learn about initiatives and how to create and manage them.

Initiatives Overview

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 with an initiative and then publish the initiative into a testing environment. This is faster and easier than pushing all of the individual entities, 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 environment and changes the status 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 the spring season. The marketing manager is assisted by the product specialist and by the product manager to define the content of the initiative. Then, the buying, revenue, billing specialists join briefly to assist with testing. Finally, the sales marketing manager takes over the initiative ownership through the rollout operation. The product 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.

Note:

  • 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 with the initiative specified on the page.
  • If both the offer and the initiative being cloned are still in design, the initiative can’t be modified. Retry after all entities are in the Active or Launched state.

See Manage Entity Lifecycles Using Initiatives for information on how you can manage the publishing and lifecycle status of catalog entities using initiatives.

See Publish Initiatives to Spoke Systems for information on how you can publish an initiative to the spoke systems.

Teams

You can use the Teams functionality to manage and collaborate on Initiatives. Teams construct is where group of users come together to achieve a common goal of working on an Initiative targeted for market release. This is applicable to the design time catalog, where, for a Communications Service Provider (CSP) to roll out offers to the market, a group of users such as the product managers, technical specialists, and so on, work and collaborate together. This enables focused outcomes. In Launch, a set of users can be assigned to work on an initiative.

Product Manager and Product Specialist user roles will see a new dashboard as landing pages. This provides improved collaboration, streamlined communication, and enhanced productivity.

Create an Initiative

To create an initiative, follow the steps below:

  1. Click the Administration tab and then click Initiatives.

    The Initiatives page appears.

  2. On the Initiatives page, click Create Initiative.

  3. On the New Initiative page, enter the name and description of the Initiative. The ID of the initiative is automatically generated.

  4. Specify whether the initiative requires approval.

  5. Click Create.

Your initiative is listed on the Initiatives page. By default, a newly created Initiative will be in the In design state. You can now associate catalog entities to this Initiative.

Manage Initiatives

The initiatives that you have created are listed on the Initiatives page, where you can view and edit, manage lifecycle statuses, and approvals for your initiatives.

View Initiatives

Select View from the ellipsis menu to view an initiative. On the View Initiatives page, you can see details about the initiative including the following:

  • Initiative details with the basic information.

  • All the product offers and entities that are included in an initiative.

  • Publishing activities that an initiative has gone through. You can also see the different spoke systems where this initiative was published and the publish status of the initiative in those spoke systems.

Edit Initiatives

Select Edit from the ellipsis menu to edit an initiative. While editing an initiative, you can update the name and description of the initiative.

Change the Lifecycle Status

You can change the lifecycle status of an initiative from the ellipsis menu on the list page. From the ellipsis menu, select the required lifecycle status and click Confirm.

When you click Confirm, you are indicating that you have completed the design for all the changes that you have made to the initiative are and that you are ready to move the initiative to the next lifecycle status. Also, once you click Confirm for an initiative, you can no longer edit the contents of the initiative, as they become read-only. See Entity Lifecycle Management for more information.

Manage Attachments, Approvals, Alerts, and Notifications

The Initiatives entity offers additional capabilities to help business users collaborate more effectively with IT stakeholders during market releases. You can:
  • Add multiple attachments to an Initiative and view the attachment list from a user‑specified folder. All attachments are scoped within the Launch application. For example, documents related to offer design.
  • View the publish history across all lifecycle states and destinations within an Initiative, enabling tracking of publish actions and access to historical publish details.
  • Configure alerts and notifications for Initiative events based on lifecycle status changes. You can select recipients and choose events (for example, initiative assignment, approval requests, and publish status changes). Notifications are sent to the configured recipients when the event occurs.
  • Add approvers for all offers at once through Initiatives. You can now add or manage approvers for product offering approvals within an Initiative. When approval is requested (and approval is enabled), approvers are notified for that Initiative’s offers. The existing capability to override offer approvals remains available.

Seek Offer Design Approvals Using Initiatives

Optionally, you can mandate approvals for offers associated with an initiative. For more information about offer approvals, see Manage Offer Approvals.

Publish Initiatives to Spoke Systems

This section discusses how you can publish an initiative to the spoke systems.

Spoke systems are downstream applications configured as Destinations in Oracle Communications Launch Cloud Service that receive catalog, pricing, and eligibility data published from Launch. You can use an initiative to publish multiple run-time catalogs to the spoke systems. When you publish an initiative, all the entities within it are published. You define your initiatives, push to a test environment, validate the product offer, and finally publish to a production environment.

To publish initiatives without an approval process, follow the steps below:

  1. On the Initiatives page, select the initiative that you want to publish.

  2. Click Confirm from the actions menu. This moves the initiative and its entities to Ready to Publish status.

  3. Click Publish from the actions menu. This option is available only if your initiative is in the Ready to Publish status.

To publish your initiatives that have an approval process defined, follow the steps below:

  1. Click the Administration tab and then click Initiatives.

    The Initiatives page appears.

  2. On the Initiatives page, select the initiative that you want to publish.

  3. Click Confirm from the actions menu. This moves the initiative and its entities to Design Complete status.

  4. Click Initiate Approval from the actions menu.

    Your approver gets a notification for the approval request and you receive a confirmation message that your approval process has been initiated. Your approver may approve or reject your request, or add a comment. You can check the status of your initiative from the initiatives list view page. If your request has been approved, the status changes to Ready to Publish.

  5. Click Publish from the actions menu. This moves the initiative and its entities to Launched status.

After you have published your initiatives, go to the Publish Tracker to see the status of the published initiatives. You can also find the artifacts published for that initiative.

See Manage Entity Lifecycles Using Initiatives and Manage Offer Approvals for more information about the publishing process.