Steering committee meet #2

The CRM steering committee met last Thursday for its second session. In attendance were Faisal Jaswal, Nora Lance, Tracy Biga Maclean, Rebecca Cory and Steve Downing.

We covered the following agenda items, the details of which are available via the OneDrive link I’d sent out:

-Summary of work completed since the last meeting
-Review of Dynamics CRM features and functionality
-Identification of key milestones

I posed the following questions for the team:

1. Will the following units work as potential pilot programs for the tool?:
-Enrollment Services
-Multi-cultural Services
-Workforce Education

2. Matthew Birmingham, Manager of CRM Development at Grand Canyon University, is willing to provide us with a demo of Dynamics CRM. What are the best times to conduct this, with respect to peoples’ schedules?

The following questions, which I’ll escalate to our team, were posed by the committee:

1. Will students need to use their BC email accounts?
2. How long will the training sessions be?
3. What’s the ETA for the confidential, note-taking function?
4. What’s the potential for online training/videos for CRM AND Sharepoint?

Additional resources for perusal:

Examples of CRM in higher education:
https://customers.microsoft.com/Pages/advancedsearch.aspx?mrmcverticals=Education

UW uses Dynamics CRM:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6Bky7R6otA

Full speed ahead

Our Case Management steering committee is scheduled to meet later this week. The following agenda items will be covered, in addition to some discussion on how to best communicate upcoming changes to our stakeholders:

-Summary of work completed since the last meeting
-Review of Dynamics CRM features and functionality
-Identification of key milestones and their dates

Our partner has provided us with an assessment document and fit gap analysis, the first being a suggested approach for each of the deployment phases and the second identifying requirements and effort involved with resolving each.

‘right’

“Did we build the right product?”

“Did we build the product right?”

Two questions that lay at the heart of every enterprise-wide deployment. They can’t always be answered to everyone’s satisfaction, but by establishing an acceptance criteria, we can attempt to meet those needs.

Dell has provided us with a formal assessment based on the requirements gathering we held a few weeks ago. The document details the requirements as identified by each unit, along with a timeline by which a working model might be deployed. More work has to be done to condense the SOW into something more manageable, and I will be updating our steering committee as more information is sent our way.

Finally, I’ve connected with the Manager of CRM at Grand Canyon University (http://www.gcu.edu). Matthew Birmingham has agreed to provide us with a demonstration of how Dynamics is being used on their campus.