Northwind Technologies, a growing software development company, faces several challenges. As the company expands, its sales team struggles with managing increasing customer interactions and sales opportunities using outdated methods like spreadsheets and manual record-keeping.
This lack of an integrated system results in several critical issues:
- Sales representatives find maintaining accurate and up-to-date customer information difficult without a centralized database, leading to duplicate records and lost opportunities.
- The absence of a streamlined process for tracking sales opportunities causes delays in the sales cycle, making it hard for the team to prioritize leads and close deals efficiently.
- Managers lack access to real-time sales data, making it challenging to assess team performance, identify trends, and make informed decisions.
- Manual tracking of follow-up tasks leads to inconsistent customer engagement, affecting customer satisfaction and retention rates.
- The sales team uses multiple disconnected tools for communication and scheduling, leading to inefficiencies and missed opportunities for collaboration.
To address these challenges and support its growth objectives, Northwind Technologies has decided to implement a CRM system tailored to its specific needs. The goal is to provide the sales team with the ability to manage customer relationships, streamline sales processes, and monitor the sales process through advanced reporting and analytics.
The project will be executed using an Agile approach, following a Scrum framework with 2-week sprints. The development phases and their estimated durations are:
| Phase | Description | Duration |
|---|---|---|
| Contact Management | Sales representatives can manage customer contacts easily. | 2 sprints |
| Sales Opportunity Tracking | Users can track sales opportunities and update their status. | 1 sprint |
| Reporting and Analytics | Sales managers can gain insights into team performance and customer interactions. | 3 sprints |
| Integration and Automation | CRM integrates with Outlook email & calendar, and sales staff receive automated reminders about meetings and tasks. | 2 sprints |
Total project duration: 8 sprints
- Product Owner: Sarah Thompson (Roadmap, Epics, Product Vision, Business Value)
- Scrum Master: David Kim (Scrum Ceremonies, provides support to the Scrum Team)
- Business Analyst: Tom Brown (User Stories and UAT)
- UX/UI Designer: Rachel Green (User Interface and interaction design)
- Frontend Developer: Lisa Chen (User Interface development and handling client-side logic such as user interaction, data validation, and rendering data)
- Backend Developer: Mark Wilson (Server-side development, database management, security, and authentication)
- QA Engineer: Alex Martinez (Testing)
- High-level epics describing each product feature
- Detailed user stories broken down from epics
- Acceptance criteria for each story
- Project timeline with task dependencies and durations
- Mapping of business requirements to user stories and test cases
This project demonstrates the transformation of high-level business requirements into actionable user stories, project planning using a Gantt chart, and ensuring traceability through a traceability matrix.
By completing this project, we ensure the CRM implementation meets stakeholder expectations, stays on schedule, and delivers measurable business value. These methodologies and frameworks will enable future project success through structured planning, execution, and tracking.