HEXO PARTNERS

An internationally recognized performing arts non-profit in Boston was being constrained by a specialized Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system in use for over a decade. Multiple departments, including Marketing, Development, and Event Operations were affected, and multiple attempts to optimize this system and align it with evolving organizational needs had previously stalled. We were engaged to conduct a discovery phase and identify requirements for future improvements.

The organization faced significant challenges:

• Stakeholder Complexity: The CRM system was used by multiple departments, with differing and sometimes conflicting requirements.

• Stalled Progress: Despite several prior attempts, the organization lacked a clear path forward. The scale of prior recommendations was beyond the organization's reach.

• Data and Process Gaps: Over time, departments developed custom workarounds, resulting in siloed data flows, significant manual work, and lack of data integrity, impeding the organization’s ability to maximize the system’s value.

1: Background

2: The Problem

3: Outcome

We delivered transformative results, including:

• Cross-Functional Alignment: Provided a way to align requirements by functional area, paving the way for stakeholders to align on priorities.

• Actionable Insights: Provided user stories covering data management, process optimization, system usability, and system performance, with ample resources for the design & development team, including tagged interview recordings, transcripts, and analysis.

• Rapid Deliverables: Produced final deliverables within just 25 business days, an extremely short time frame for a project of this scale.

Project Approach

Reviewing prior history with this project, we identified a lack of user focus in prior analysis, and focused our efforts on this area. The key components of our approach were:

• Stakeholder Expansion: Starting with key stakeholders identified by the Governance Team, we conducted small-group and individual interviews, expanding the stakeholder list across department lines as needed.

• AI-Assisted Analysis: Given the large amount of interview recordings, we utilized specialized AI tools to help us accelerate the work of organizing user feedback into themes and developing requirements tagged and categorized by user profile, feature category, and importance.

• Broad scope: Early review suggested that our analysis needed to include data management, process workflows, system usability, and performance in order to fully understand the requirements.

• Prior Analysis: We reviewed prior recommendations to help identify areas where prior efforts fell short and to build on past insights.

In Project Management, "artifacts" are items or documents that provide evidence of progress, goals, and results of a project. Artifacts for this project included:

• User Stories: A comprehensive list of user stories to guide the development of functional requirements.

• Interview Archive: An organized collection of interview recordings, transcripts, tags, and categories, providing rich context for future design and development work.

• Cross-Functional Alignment Tools: User stories and interview snippets were tagged for cross-functional alignment around shared user experiences and pain points.

• Recommendations: A summary of key improvement areas, including Data Management, Process Improvement, Usability Enhancements, and Performance Enhancements.

Project "Artifacts"

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