User Story Creation under new L2 breaks the delivery flow

Hi Team,

Following my discussion with James via email:

1. When we are creating new scope, we can see that new L2 Strategize has been added to L1 Align and for Salesforce Projects it contains only 1 L4 with to L5 tasks: User Stories / Requirements.

2. In the master WBS comments is "VS - Move L3 and L4 to new Substage - Strategize", without any reasoning.

3. Tricky part is here: all high-level designs, assessing current state and defining future state is in L2 Define. Where User stories creation is a final output post business process design and solutioning. Such change breaks SDLC logic for us (moreover, NFR User stories are still in L2 Define). Could you please help us to clarify the reason for such change, as we need to cascade this change to our stakeholders?

Received response:

"The Vendor Selection Delivery Standard required a move of that entire scope from Define into Strategize to occur after Phase 0 work, and as an input into Design / Define. There were originally 3 L3 activities that covered this scope “Perform RFI”, “Perform RFP”, and “Finalize Vendor Selection and Make Recommendation”. This content was updated and split out into the new activities in the standard and occur exclusively in Strategize. One of the inputs required for the Vendor Selection is the L4 “Identify User Stories/ Requirements by Exception”, so this had to move from define into strategize as well, otherwise the sequence would not flow."

Business impact: Phase 0 very often is finishing with definition of High Level Architecture and Solution design with defining key business capabilities, epics and features [very rare for bigger projects with User story creation as often it requires moving to low level design afterwards].

So, moving this L3 and L4 to new L2 before the Define stage breaks project delivery flow and will force us for all our engagements to move it back manually to define stage.

Please consider our feedback for future content improvements as for now it will cause confusion for our stakeholders.