CRM System Software Development: Requirements to Testing

Requirements Analysis for a New CRM System

Managing customer relationships is critically important to the stability and long-term growth of any business. Being able to provide sales, service, product management, marketing, and senior management with a full, 360-degree review of all customer activity is essential for keeping any business tightly synchronized around customer needs and requirements. In defining the strategy that will be used for completing the requirements analysis, the clients' strategic plans, goals, and requirements need to be taken into account first. This will be accomplished through a series of interviews with the clients, in which business analysts and programmers from the development team will participate. It is also imperative to understand the specific application requirements of the client; to achieve this, use cases and software requirement specifications, in addition to joint requirements, must be defined. The requirements analysis phase of any large-scale project must also include periodic measurements of performance — including analytics and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) — to measure overall progress relative to the project goal.

The requirements analysis for a new CRM system needs to encompass stakeholder identification, stakeholder interviews, Joint Requirements Development (JRD) planning and feedback sessions, definition and finalization of specific CRM and analytics application use case requirements, definition of when prototypes by phase will be available, and stakeholder requirements analysis. Integral to the development of any CRM system is the inclusion of sales and marketing teams, who will have highly specific needs with regard to analytics and Business Intelligence (BI) reporting. The development team will need to concentrate thoroughly on BI use case analysis to ensure the final CRM system will meet and exceed the clients' expectations (Choudhury & Harrigan, 2014). The requirements analysis will also need to develop a specific approach to defining taxonomies for capturing stakeholder, engineering, and developer knowledge, as well as lessons learned from previous implementations. Assumptions regarding the budget for new application development and the costs of legacy data system integration and data migration are also captured during this initial phase. Costs and project plans are defined during the requirements analysis phase.

Phase I: Stakeholder Identification, Interviews, and Requirements Analysis

The scope of software projects often grows in direct proportion to the number of stakeholders involved and the uniqueness of their needs, compounded by how each stakeholder often perceives the time-to-value of specific features differently. For CRM systems, this is particularly challenging in that each stakeholder group — starting with sales and progressing through marketing, product management, services, support, and senior management — has unique information and reporting requirements. The best-managed CRM software development projects take into account this multiplicity of information requirements and create a series of stakeholder interviews to ensure overall alignment of the project plan, specifications, and ongoing coding with customer needs and requirements (Ko, Kim, Kim, & Woo, 2008). For purposes of this project, the following table defines the key stakeholders, an explanation of their unique requirements, and a timetable of interviews with each. Of this group of stakeholders, sales and sales management will use the customer records activity features most frequently, while senior management will rely most on analytics and rolled-up sales forecasts. This requirements analysis will in turn drive the use case planning, goals of project development, use cases, and ultimately the Functional Requirements Document (FRD) that will define the parameters of the next phase: Software Design.

Figure 1: Stakeholder Goals, Use Case Analysis, and Interview Timetable

Information Systems: Administration; support for backups; platform requirements (cloud-based vs. on-premise); maintenance cost strategies; testing assistance.

Marketing: Marketing program management; analytics and metrics of performance on marketing and selling programs; direct mail and content-based marketing initiatives; support for customer upsell and cross-sell analytics; sales funnel analytics.

Pricing: Elasticity of demand analysis; price sensitivity and pricing scenario analysis; testing of new product ideas and concepts using the CRM system as a platform for test/re-test analysis.

Product Management: Feedback from customers on existing product designs and areas of improvement; analysis of failure data to identify where the clients' products can be improved; support for coordinating sales calls; testing of new products.

Sales & Sales Management: 360-degree view of all customer activity; lead scoring feedback; sales force automation.

Services: Pricing analysis on current and future services.

Senior Management: Funnel analysis and KPI performance reporting on dashboards (delivered to their mobile devices).

With the specific goals and objectives defined by each stakeholder group, the project team will next determine whether a cloud-based or on-premise suite of applications is best for the client. Cloud-based applications are more complex to produce initially, yet they can be delivered quickly to sales teams' mobile devices while also being more efficient and cost-effective to maintain. In addition to these benefits, cloud-based CRM systems can be quickly modified to reflect the client's unique requirements (Choudhury & Harrigan, 2014).

Since the clients' sales teams are often traveling and do not have immediate access to customer, sales, pricing, and service data, it is highly recommended that the client select a cloud-based development strategy. Throughout the stakeholder analysis and use case interviews, the following factors will be evaluated to verify that the development of a cloud-based CRM application is in the best interests of the client.

The following are the key decision factors the client needs to consider during the requirements analysis phase of development when selecting between a cloud-based and an on-premise CRM application:

1. Mobility Access and Support for Dynamic User Experience. It is highly recommended that the client consider the needs of their sales team's access on mobile devices and define one of the design objectives as providing a dynamic CRM application capable of working just as easily on a mobile device as on a laptop or traditional PC. A cloud-based system will allow for this level of device agility and flexibility, while an on-premise application would require customized programming for each specific device (Kim & Mukhopadhyay, 2011).

2. Real-Time Collaboration. The solution must support real-time collaboration across the entire sales team and partners while ensuring all reporting and traffic stays in compliance with internal customer requirements.

3. Legacy System Integration. The extent of integration with legacy, third-party, and proprietary systems that the client has acquired over time — yet each of which plays a crucial role in the selling cycles in process and planned for the future — must be carefully evaluated. Custom system integration to new on-premise systems is often accomplished with unique connectors and adapters that can cost between $40,000 and $50,000 each to create and maintain (Adebanjo, 2003). It is highly recommended that, if the client has legacy, third-party, and proprietary systems to be integrated with the proposed CRM system, the decision be made to select a cloud-based platform that includes Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), which significantly streamline the time and costs involved in integrating existing systems.

4. Security and Scalability. More effective, globally scalable security models are available on cloud platforms (including Salesforce1) versus on-premise systems that often lack security standards and stability. It makes more sense for the client to select a cloud platform that enables immediate scalability and is built on a security model that includes single sign-on and the ability to manage workflows at the administration level more effectively (Light, 2003). The Salesforce1 platform is in compliance with FISMA, SSAE 16 (formerly SAS 70), ISO 27001, PCI-DSS Level 1, Safe Harbor, TRUSTe standards, and SSL 128-bit VeriSign transmission-level security.

It is highly recommended that the client choose to have their CRM application cloud-based, built on the Salesforce1 platform, enabling greater agility, scalability, and performance.