The Challenge 

 Our client, a rapidly growing charitable organisation, realised their CRM system just wasn’t cutting it anymore. It was evident that the current system couldn’t keep pace with their evolving needs and was unlikely to support their ambitious plans for further expansion. 

 They had a couple of false starts trying to kick off this project but struggled to gain traction. As a charitable organisation, they were keen to avoid any mistakes that could waste their precious funds.  

Recognising they needed help, their Head of Digital, who had experience in larger organisations with structured change teams, asked us to support them. She knew the importance of a thorough analysis approach and was well aware of the risks of not doing so, such as investing time and money into a system that doesn’t meet their needs, dealing with manual workarounds, not future-proofing for growth, and ending up with a frustrated team. 

Our Approach 

We started with some bite-sized consultancy to determine the most appropriate framework for their project, considering the size, complexity, and growth plans of this charitable organisation.  

We delivered a structured analysis approach and helped our clients in determining a clear scope statement for the project and co-delivered a detailed scope document.  This ensured that the whole organisation was clear on what the project was, and wasn’t, looking to deliver.  

We conducted a thorough stakeholder analysis to ensure all parties affected by the change were identified and assessed. This crucial first step would ensure that our subsequent requirements gathering was thorough as well as providing essential information for driving training and testing during the implementation phase. Setting them up well to ensure a smooth transition and successful project outcome. 

We seamlessly dovetailed the analysis approach with our client’s emerging procurement strategy, guiding them to consider the essential elements for technology procurement. By tailoring our technology procurement approach we were able to provide them with a bespoke procurement process, ensuring that it covered the aspects most important to them. This included delivering a Request for Information (RFI), Due diligence and Request for proposal (RFP) templates, bespoke scoring system and providing a tool to generate scores. 

Process and Analysis 

To support our client through the analysis and procurement, we provided a skilled business analyst through our embedded resource solutions. She quickly got to work, identifying all relevant business processes and clearly documenting these in a process hierarchy.  She worked with the stakeholders to thoroughly understand the ‘as-is’ state, identifying pain points and helping them develop their ideal ‘to-be’ state. 

She facilitated both workshops and one-to-one conversations to draw out, document and validate high-level requirements.  These were later developed into more detailed user stories designed to support implementation and testing. 

The requirements were crucial to the procurement process, enabling each vendor and solution to be measured against their specific requirements. We supported them through the entire selection process, providing the content to share with vendors, identifying due diligence questions, liaising with vendors, facilitating scoring sessions and supporting conversations around the results. 

The Outcome 

The benefits were clear, our client could select a new CRM based on their unique needs. They made the decision with confidence, knowing that all user groups’ needs were understood and considered. Our approach provided them with a robust, evidence-based decision-making process and an impartial, knowledge-based selection, ensuring they were investing their funds wisely. 

The entire process was meticulously documented, with clear evidence and decision points. This was crucial for this charitable organisation, ensuring audit and accountability requirements were met. 

And the best part? Should they need support with implementation, we can provide it through our embedded resource solution. They now have access to knowledgeable experts who understand their organisation and its specific needs.