Requeriments of CRM

Over the years, we have heard a variety of terms that characterize a set of requirements CRM documented. The conditions include: RFP, high-level requirements, design, functional specification, plan specifications, requirements and more agile.

Labels aside, there are several levels deep CRM requirements. As we held in previous posts, more profound is his team enters the definition of requirements before selecting a CRM system, the more successful your CRM implementation will be.

1. Feature Requirements

A list of system features required is similar to the following, a format that can often be found in requests for proposal (RFP) format. Feature Requirements do not describe any specific behaviors.

Simply indicate if the CRM system has some yet-to-be-specified level functionality in an area. Here's an example of feature requirements.


The CRM system must be compatible with the following:

• Managing contacts
• Integrating Outlook
• The integration of Google Apps
• Account management
• Opportunity Management
• Reports
• Dashboards • Case Management
• Knowledge Base
• Chat
• Field Service
• Workflow
• Escalations
• Email marketing integration

By creating a list of required features is a good starting point, does not give enough information CRM providers to adapt a demonstration to the business needs of your company. Furthermore, no service providers are given sufficient information to provide meaningful estimates.

2. Business Requirements

A business requirements document is a high-level analysis of current weaknesses and possible solutions business. No cover features CRM product itself. This document is usually derived from stakeholders and end-user interviews. The document may include problems / solutions and future pairings current state / desired state pairings.

The document business requirements, ideally have an associated set of slides that can be used in a workshop to present and validate the results.

While business requirements are usually documented by someone who is a business analyst, a little experience of CRM can be useful for the process of the interview and for mounting interview information.

A general knowledge of what other companies have done to solve business problems and what is realistic to expect a CRM solution can help with the translation of business requirements.



3. Non-Functional Requirements

I have to admit that this requirement label is new to us. I discovered this tag to read the definition of "functional requirements" of Wikipedia. According to the Wikipedia, "a nonfunctional requirement is a requirement that specifies the criteria that can be used to judge the performance of a system, rather than specific behaviors."

If we apply this label and definition of CRM, non-functional requirements may include criteria / pairings requirements such as:

• Availability: 99.9%
• Scalability: Easily scalable to more than 5,000 users and more than 1,000,000 records
• Backups: We should be able to download backups complete databases on a daily basis
• Disaster Recovery: data centers with redundant failover time of less than an hour
• Cost: The system should cost more than $ X per month

There is value in the separation of non-functional requirements such as these functional requirements.

4. Functional Requirements

The functional requirements the amount of detail is carried to the next level.

In general, functional requirements are expressed in the form "system should allow for this specific thing."

• Why does the requirement is necessary (what the current problem is)
• A description of the behavior required
• The details of a use case
• The results of the business of dealing with the requirement

We have developed a document functional requirements such as CRM to make you jump start.

5. System Design

Again, citing an article in Wikipedia, "the implementation plan of functional requirements detailed in the system design."

Therefore, the system design is the process of defining and developing systems to meet the specific requirements of stakeholders and users of the system.

Also known as a model or specification, system design gets down to the real conception of how the system should work. In the world of CRM, including details such as custom field names, data types and select values ​​from the list. Includes rules workflow and data migration maps. The worksheets and flowcharting tools become part of the document set.

You can combine several of the previous levels. For smaller organizations, functional design and system requirements can be part of the same document.