Benefits of Strategic Planning
Building a Foundation Through Strategic Planning
Effective planning is the foundation for a successful project. TAI starts with three envisioning workshops to help you plan better: a design sprint to determine your problem's scope and vet your alternatives; a customer journey workshop to document and review all customer-facing processes and create a better customer experience; and an internal process analysis where TAI documents your internal processes and reviews them for optimization.
These three workshops drive the user stories that define your solution. The resulting user stories are estimated, prioritized, and mapped; a return on investment is calculated; and a release plan is developed. Product selection is based on the requirements implied by your user stories, and after a project charter and technical architecture is developed, the stage is set for software construction.
Our Approach to Strategic Planning
Technology Advisors follows an agile planning methodology for the most comprehensive approach to software selection.
Design Sprints
A Design Sprint is a formal, four-day workshop where the project team documents problems in the organization and vets their solutions. The team breaks out into smaller segments and brainstorms alternatives to present to the rest of the team. Everyone votes on the best option and works together to vet the chosen solution. In the end, a product scope and an approach are created. These help drive the project charter.
Project Charter
The Project Charter is a statement of the scope, objectives, and participants in a software project. It provides a preliminary delineation of roles and responsibilities, outlines the project's key goals, identifies the main stakeholders, and defines the authority of the project team. The project charter is used throughout the project lifecycle.
Customer Journey Workshop
A Customer Journey Workshop helps map the customer experience based on different personas. It documents the different types of customers and how they interact with your company. It maps their journey from the time they are a lead through their transition to a customer. The Journey map defines and creates the customer-facing user stories and the experiences each of your customers have when they work with your company.
Business Process Mapping
Business Process Mapping (BPM) completes the mapping development by documenting your internal processes. While the Customer Journey map is external facing, the Business Process map is internal facing and helps fill in the blanks on the user stories for your solution.
User Stories
User Stories are part of an agile approach that shifts the focus from writing about requirements to talking about them. All agile user stories contain a persona, a goal, and a task to achieve the goal. It also includes acceptance criteria which defines a condition, an action that happened as a result of that condition, and the outcome.
User Story Mapping
User Story Mapping is the process of determining the return on investment for each user story as well as the relationships between users stories. Many times, you can't complete a user story until other stories have also been completed. These users stories are clustered and organized by ROI so TAI can build a release plan.
Release Planning
Release Planning assumes your CRM implementation will be released in phases and it creates a roadmap for each release based upon sets of user stories and their ROI.
CRM Selection
CRM Selection is the process of taking the user stories and mapping them to functional specifications. Software is reviewed based upon how closely the software's functions meet the requirements generated by the users stories.
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