Team:Garin Fons, David Hutchful, Cheng-Lun Li, Kate MacDougall, Ping Yu

Background:

We worked with ForeSee Results, a leading consulting firm which provides consulting services for E-Commerce and website usability. ForeSee Results has more than 10,000 business contacts in their database and is concerning the efficiency of the process of managing their customer relationship. My team and I conducted rapid contextual design and provided recommendations to improve this process.

The Process:

1. Held initial meeting with client to define the project goal, identified organizational structure and stakeholders.

2. Performed on-site observations, contextual inquiries, and in-depth interviews to understand workflow, information flow, and work culture. Held interpretation sessions after each round of data collection.

3. Utilized data modeling techniques to extract emerging themes and consolidated process from raw data. Models included culture model, cause-effect model, consolidated sequence model, artifact model, SIPOC model, and affinity diagram.

4. Analyzed data. Identified issues involved with the work process and provided recommendations for improvements.

Key Findings:

a. Many employees were unfamiliar with the way other employees use contact information. As a result, these employees do not always input or create the data that is necessary for their co-workers to complete their work tasks.

b. We identified inconsistency of the incentive structures of stakeholders when using the customer relationship management(CRM) system. As a result, the CRM system failed to support certain information needs as a groupware.

c. Our client suffered from incomplete data. This is because there was no official form or minimum information requirement for data entry.

d. Inconsistency in naming conventions led to inaccurate data. We noticed a lot of duplicate records for same companies. Precious customer information was stored in either of the records and hidden from the other.

e. The CRM system didn't track changes of records. Besides, it didn't provide the fields users need to enter information. Users wasted time to look for the most current information all in ONE giant text box.

The Results:

We provided recommendations, focusing on three main problem areas: 1. Incomplete and inaccurate data. 2. The design and capability of the CRM system. 3. The employees' lack of awareness of coworkers' work process and information needs. For each of the problem area, we list the subproblems and our solutions to tackle them. Please view our final report for detailed information.

Responsibilities:

My responsibilities included conducting interviews, on-site observation, making data models (fishbone model, consolidated sequence model, affinity diagram), and final report editing.