Major project process

CRM major project process

Submit completed CRM enhancement request form to crmhelp@iu.edu

If your department has functional enhancements, data integrations, or new solutions for the IU CRM platform, they must be completed as a scoped project that has gone through the established CRM initiative prioritization and approval process.

The IU CRM team will work with the appropriate stakeholder group to develop an approved project charter that defines the scope, timeline, resource requirements, and an estimated budget for your project. The project charter will need review, approval, and prioritization by CRM executive leadership for incorporation into the enterprise-wide IU CRM Initiative's strategic roadmap. It is important to note that these are technical projects only.

Project scope will be focused on technical solution design and implementation. Adoption, business process redesign, and all other functional-related tasks should be owned and managed by the stakeholders and adopting units.

If you have an existing CRM pillar that has an established stakeholder steering committee, the CRM team will manage all of your users’ submitted change requests in an established backlog. Those requests will be approved and prioritized by the appropriate steering committee. Requests to establish new pillars will have a stakeholder group designated by the project executive sponsor.

Roles and responsibilities

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

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).

  • Are subject matter experts/business analysts from the functional side and are allocated by the project stakeholders
  • Will have a portion of their full-time employees committed to the project
  • Adhere to the adoption timeline and sequence of objectives
  • Provide 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 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

  • Maintain overall project timeline and completion target dates
  • Coordinate all project resources, handoffs, and task assignment/completion
  • Provide communication and regular status updates to project stakeholders
  • Manage all third-party consulting resources

  • Plan and facilitate discovery sessions and document requirements
  • Identify, analyze, and document use cases, acceptance criteria, dependencies, and anticipated impacts
  • Communicate and transition requirements to the technical team
  • Coordinate/facilitate user acceptance testing and signoff
  • Demo developed solutions and provide functional partner training
  • Ensure signoff of all requirements, design approval, and acceptance testing
  • Create user documentation for the developed solutions

  • Develop all solutions that satisfy requirements and project objectives
  • Design, implement, and configure all technical solutions
  • Select and configure all new tools and/or applications as necessary
  • Test solutions to ensure quality and validate completeness
  • Move solutions through standard production path: stage > test > production
  • Implement all production deployments

Projects may require third-party consultants who will be contracted to work as implementation partners. Consultant resources will be managed by CRM project lead and leveraged where necessary.

Incremental releases

Project objectives will be developed and delivered in increments. Each increment will represent a complete subset of functionality. 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.