We began with a discovery stage that included internal stakeholders and IT consultants. This project is unique over other projects because of the nature of the data and timing during an in progress acquisition. An in-depth discovery stage was the right approach for this project to identify the many locations the data was housed over 10+ years.

The old interface was very overwhelming at first glance from a UX perspective with many unnecessary fields that would never be filled. Reporting was cumbersome and difficult in the old interface. All salespeople relied on one person to run the report which took time to generate and customize. The time between edits made and reporting out made it difficult to keep up with pipeline updates in the market. 

I made assumptions about how easy it would be to map the old CRM Dynamics data to an already in-use internal tool. Since part of the company was already using the IFS software, we needed to close the gap between our data to the data already in our tool before migration. When you move houses you have different rooms in the new house than you did in the old house. We had to take into account those space and shape of those new rooms before we moved in our data from the old house.

II worked with the UX Researcher and Developer to build out testing for the sales team prior to launch. We tested in the test environment extensively before migrating our data into the production environment. Each sales person was able to enter a new opportunity, edit opportunities, and see the entire pipeline from one interface. While migrating from test to production there were bugs that the entire sales team helped us to work out through live sessions with the development team.

Reporting is seamless in the new interface, IFS,  so that all salespeople can export reports instead of relying on one person to run the report. This closed the loop on more accurate reporting and made live edits during meetings possible.

The most challenging parts of this project were getting team agreement on data points that were necessary to track projects. When it came to areas of ambiguity it was necessary for the team to meet and discuss what each field meant to members of the sales team who represented different sectors of the industry and come to agreement about the best unified path forward.

The project concluded with a live product for the sales team to input data, groom their opportunity pipeline and contacts, and export to excel to utilize for metrics. The new CRM is live in IFS with the sales team using this as their main point of data entry for customer tracking. During usability testing we were able to troubleshoot live with the sales team and Developer to customize screens to further streamline their input process. Weekly reporting is now updated live with the sales team viewing entry of information.

The IFS CRM project is part of a much larger ecosystem redesign for enterprise resource planning. I’m happy to talk more about the project scope and my role in an interview.