IU CRM major project process

If your department has functional enhancements, data integrations, or new solutions for the IU CRM platform, the changes must be scoped as a major project and go through the CRM initiative prioritization and approval process.

The IU CRM team will work with your stakeholder group to develop an approved project charter that defines the scope, timeline, resource requirements, and an estimated budget for your project. CRM executive leadership will review, approve, and prioritize the project charter for incorporation into the enterprise-wide IU CRM Initiative's strategic roadmap.

Because the project scope will focus on technical solution design and implementation, your stakeholders and the adopting units will own and manage adoption, business process redesign, and all other functional-related tasks.

If you have an existing CRM pillar that has an established stakeholder steering committee, the CRM team will manage your users’ submitted change requests in an established backlog and the appropriate steering committee will approve and prioritize the requests. The project executive sponsor will designate a stakeholder group to review requests to establish new pillars.

Project stakeholders

• Selected by the sponsoring functional area
• Provides input and define and approve objectives and timelines
• Define and refine the scope of what will be included in project
• Provides and maintain appropriate leadership support and resources
• Designate functional partners and allocate full-time equivalent hours

Project change control

Any change or addition to identified objectives that will impact timeline, budget, or scope must be approved by the designated change control team. They will also provide approval to all changes or additional requirements that impact project scope (deliverables/timeline/budget).

Project functional partners

• Subject matter experts/business analysts from the functional side and are allocated by the project stakeholders
• Have a portion of their full-time employees committed to the project
• Adhere to the adoption timeline and sequence of objectives
• Provides functional knowledge and timely responses to requests for information
• Participate in solution demos and provide signoff of solution designs
• Complete user acceptance testing facilitated by CRM analyst team
• Adhere to one round of revisions as designated in adoption timeline
• Provide acceptance and signoff of completed solutions for deployment

Designated approvers

Designated approvers will be one to two stakeholders and one to two functional partners that will have the authority to provide all approvals on behalf of each group where they are needed in the project.

• Stakeholder—provide final approval on project scope and charter
• Functional partner—provide approval for all documented requirements, design approval, and user acceptance testing

CRM project lead

• Maintains overall project timeline and completion target dates
• Coordinates all project resources, handoffs, and task assignment/completion
• Provides communication and regular status updates to project stakeholders
• Manages all third-party consulting resources

CRM analyst team

• Plans and facilitates discovery sessions and document requirements
• Identifies, analyzes, and documents use cases, acceptance criteria, dependencies, and anticipated impacts
• Communicates and transitions requirements to the technical team
• Coordinates/facilitates user acceptance testing and signoff
• Demos developed solutions and provide functional partner training
• Ensures signoff of all requirements, design approval, and acceptance testing
• Creates user documentation for the developed solutions

CRM technical team

• Develops all solutions that satisfy requirements and project objectives
• Designs, implements, and configures all technical solutions
• Selects and configures all new tools and/or applications as necessary
• Tests solutions to ensure quality and validate completeness
• Moves solutions through standard production path: stage > test > production
• Implements all production deployments

Implementation partner consultants

Projects may require third-party consultants who will be contracted to work as implementation partners. The CRM project lead will manage and leverage consultant resources as needed.

Project objectives will be developed and delivered in increments. Each increment will represent a complete subset of functionality, and the increment may be either small or large. Once an increment is complete, the next increment will start and repeat all increment stages.

• Objective: High-level deliverable, which can include one to multiple features
• Releases will be monthly for those features that are ready for deployment

Stage 1 - Analysis 

CRM business analysts will schedule and conduct meetings with functional partners to define, refine, and document detailed requirements of each scoped objective along with user acceptance criteria. The purpose of the analysis process is to define requirements of business objectives, but not to prescribe technical solutions. Technical solutions will be designed in the development stage by the CRM technical team to ensure extensibility and alignment with the IU CRM platform. Each requirement will be documented in a project space in Confluence. Functional partners must approve requirements and acceptance criteria before development begins. 

Stage 2 -Development 

Requirements will be transitioned to the CRM technical resources unit for development. 

• The technical team will evaluate the requirements and determine an appropriate solution by using Jira, an issue and project tracking software, and it will be assigned to a CRM technical owner who will be responsible for the development of the solution. 
• Progress, status information, and updates will be tracked in Jira, and development deadlines will be established for each requirement. 
• Development can include the selection and implementation of vended applications. 
• Completed solutions will be moved to the Salesforce stage environment, which will be used for technical testing and design approval. 
• After stage deployment, the technical team will transition the solution to the business analysts for a final review and design approval. 

Stage 3 -Design approval 

CRM analysts will provide solution demo in the CRM stage instance to project function partners. 

• Demos will be conducted and functional users will provide feedback in a timely basis. 
• If revisions are needed, the solution will transition back to the development team who will make the revisions. 
• There will only be one round of design revisions. 
• If revisions are identified that go beyond the initial requirements and scope, they will be re-evaluated and moved to a change control process. 
• Functional partner-designated approvers must document design signoff prior to testing. 

Stage 4 -User acceptance testing 

After the design is approved, the CRM technical team will move the solution from CRM stage to the CRM sandbox instance. 

• CRM analysts will provide training to functional partners and coordinate/facilitate user acceptance testing in the sandbox environment. 
• A reasonable testing window that aligns with the project timeline will be recommended by the CRM analysts. 
• Any deviation in the testing window may result in delaying the project timeline. 
• It will be the responsibility of the designated approver(s) to indicate that all acceptance criteria have been satisfied. 

Stage 5 -Deployment 

After user acceptance testing and signoff is complete, the CRM technical team will package the completed solutions and push them to the CRM production environment as part of a standard monthly release cycle. Once in production, any issues identified will be considered production support. Any revisions or updates after solutions have been moved to production are considered change requests and will be incorporated into future project phases.