How to Use CP Automation to Manage Engagements

Example Project build with CP Automation - guiding light, new automation template

Current Projects built with CP automation - mostly includes older automation template*

What is CPR?

Customer Project (CP) automation was an effort initially designed back in 2022 by Adriano Fonseca as an OKR to improve our delivery processes. The original design can be found here. This design has changed a bit as we have worked to revive the effort.

CPR is the framework for how we would like to manage delivering engagements in a standardized, repeatable manner all within GitLab. Each customer will have their own group in GitLab and that group will contain a project for each SOW we deliver for that customer. These groups and projects will house all the information around the project delivery to easily track the progress and health of a project as well as provide a paper trail for all the work we have done during the project.

How does an SOW flow into CP?

A PSQuote quote contains one to many quote lines. Those quote lines map 1:1 to epics within a customer group on gitlab.com and each epic is then treated as a workstream. That customer group will contain one to many projects depending on how many SOWs we deliver for that customer. For each epic, the PM will create various issues tracking specific work towards the completion of each workstream.

What are the common components?

• A customer group: This group will house all the work we do for a specific customer
• An SOW/PO project: These projects will reside within the customer group and house all the work we do within that specific SOW or PO
• Workstream epics at the customer group label: These are what tie directly to the activities in the SOW
• A standard library of issue templates
• A standard library of comment templates
• A standard series of boards covering the status of each task/issue per workstream
• Any specific documentation from our delivery kits

How will all this get created?

We have a project called CPR_GitOps that handles the process of automatically creating the foundation of groups, projects, epics, etc. per customer project. This automation is triggered by our Quilt API through PSQuote. We are currently using a merge request as the staging area to provide all the necessary details CPR_GitOps needs to properly scaffold out a project to deliver.

What does the PM need to configure once the Project is ready?

• issue board
• readme