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Best Practices with Unica Campaign V75 – Should I develop in my production environment?

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Nov 16 2009

If you were disciplined as a child you are probably familiar with the following retort, "Yes, you can but you may not". What this expression relayed to the one being chastised is that just because you have the power to do something does not justify doing it. So how about we discuss something that I am sure weighs on the minds of you and your campaign developers. Should you let your campaign developers develop new campaigns in the Unica production environment? We can come back to that question in a minute. How about we first take a poll and see how many clients currently allow their campaign developers to develop brand new campaigns in the production environment, without first having them develop in a non-production environment. As the results come in I will share with you some of the arguments I hear regarding why clients develop in the production environment.

Here are seven reasons I have heard clients give regarding why they are developing in the production environment instead of using a development environment:

  1. Meta data does not transfer over with the campaign flowchart when migrating from development to production (e.g. offers)
  2. The data in the development environment is not in sync with the production data
  3. We do not own a development environment
  4. It is too difficult to migrate in Unica V75
  5. We do not have access to the server so we cannot copy flowcharts from the development environment to the production environment
  6. We are too small a team to do this type of separation of duties
  7. We do not know how to make this happen

If you answered any one of these (or all of them) then keep reading this article. Otherwise, please stay the course. It is a best practice to separate your development work from your production work in Unica V75. What do we mean by separating your development work from your production work? We mean that the two should never intermingle. In a best practice environment, developers should not be able to access the production environment. Once a developer has completed their unit testing then the integration testing should take place.

 

It is a best practice to separate your development work from your production work in Unica V75.

 

Once the integration testing has been conducted then the user acceptance testing (UAT) should take place. Only when all of the testing (including UAT) is completed should the flowchart be installed in a production environment. And note that one does not just "install" the flowchart in production. The following steps should occur for any new flowchart being implemented in production:

1. Approvals need to be received from the business owner and the change manager

a. A change manager (generally the manager in charge of the functioning of the technical application) should approve all implementations in the production environment.

b. Approvals should be audit-able so when the question arises regarding "How did that campaign get into the production environment?" the answer is it was approved by the change manager (and by the business partner when they approved the UAT).

c. The change manager is not only approving the migration of the flowchart but is also acknowledging the wishes of the business partner (i.e. that the requirements were met and that the business partner wants the campaign implemented in production too)

 

2. There needs to be completed design document usually created by the campaign developer

a. The person installing the flowchart in production should have the benefit of a design document which elaborates on all of the components of the flowchart (offers, table catalog, frequency, estimated counts, approximate run time, etc.). This removes the blinders from the eyes of the person installing the flowchart in production. They should know what to expect the first time they run the flowchart.

b. Folders will have to be created on the production server for the list pulls anyway so it would be good to have that documented. c. The documentation also identifies those parties who should be contacted should a need arise (i.e. the developer, the business partner, etc.).

 

3. There needs to be an implementation plan

a. The implementation plan does not need to be complex. However it would be appropriate to think about installing the new campaign during off-hours so that it does not interfere with the production runs.

b. The implementation plan should stipulate the go/no-go decision. For instance if the flowchart exceeds a tolerance (too many customers on the list, run-time too long, etc.) then someone needs to make the decision as to what happens. Often times there are other deadlines subsequent to the launching of a flowchart (like the drop date for the direct mail at the mail house) so these decisions may impact the broader marketing organization.

And there are other considerations as well when implementing a flowchart in production so the list above is by no means comprehensive. One should also consider the existing archival procedures, compliance and privacy policies, job automation, and the communication necessary both inside and outside of the organization, etc. for each new flowchart. Again each of these components may not be applicable to your new flowchart. But the cost of overlooking a policy, procedure, or integration component may be prohibitive when considering the impact it may have on your reputation with your customers.

So are you allowing your developers to develop in the production environment? If you are one of those clients who gave one of the seven reasons given above, then rest assured that there is a simple answer and a solution to your problem. Each one of those seven reasons is easily overcome. How about the results from our poll? Remember the poll that we took at the beginning of this blog regarding how many clients allow their developers to develop in the production environment? Well the results are in and you know what your answer was. And so do I. Looks like we have a lot of work ahead of us :)

You can respond with your feedback by adding a comment to my blog or by dropping me a line at greg_denlea@csgsystems.com. I would love to take this topic up personally with each of you!

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Dec 8 2009

Vandana said:

I really look forward to reading your blogs. Could you share your thoughts on getting Quick Counts from Unica Campaign 7.5?

Dec 14 2009

Greg Denlea said:

Hi Vandana,
Thank you for reading my blogs! Towards your question “Could you share your thoughts on getting Quick Counts from Unica Campaign 7.5?” you ask a very good question.

Unica provides counts when you load tables to a catalog so you should have counts readily available when you originally select a table in a process box (the number which shows in the lower right hand corner of the process box prior to running it). Another way you can have quicker counts is to have your data built into strategic segments – and these strategic segments could be built during the off-hours – so the counts would be waiting for you when you show up to work.

It always makes sense to divide and conquer when it comes to working with very large datasets. So any part of the work that could be accomplished by creating subsets of data prior to pulling those tables into Unica would be helpful. This could be accomplished using strategic segments, or even database views. Please let me know if I have answered your question to your satisfaction. Talk to you soon!

Jun 3 2010

Gokul Kumar Gopal said:

Another way is to use the unica_acsesutil tool to compute counts overnight..

Nov 11 2010

Gagan Dutta said:

It's really helpful from Client perspective to understand what are the things we required to deploy a requirement from a development environment to the Production environment.

In you blog, you are talking about the best practices while deploying or movement of Flowcharts from Dev to Prod. I need few inputs on the best practices to be followed ( like naming conventions, pre-requisites etc) while designing the Campaign's, marketing Operations i.e. Plan,project and programs. I am working on Unica 8.0.

Thanks in advance!

Looking forward for your reply.

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