Partner CRM

IBM Business Partners are an important channel for world wide sales. The catalog, pricing and customer management needed modernizing. This was the first end to end approach for that.

Bring modern opportunity management to IBM Business Partners

I have been working on the transformation of the Business Partner experience for about a decade.  This has taken many forms, none of which have seen the light of day due to various business situations.

The first attempt, Business Partner Workplace, was going great, and it was working completely.  We created a new Business Partner front-end that replaces the many other systems they have to deal with.  The design is dated, but did everything users needed and did it efficiently.

Then Blue Harmony came and promised to fix it all.  Well, this was never going to work because it tried to fix everything all at once.  Blue Harmony was an vendor application that became an in-house solution once all the requested changes were added.  The design team fought with the tooling and did a credible job got making things better in an impossible situation. 

Finally, in 2016, My Sales Activity was born.  This attempt has a much better chance of success by starting incrementally and building on success.

AFTER

  • Modern and integrated

  • Incremental function adds most important first

  • Pricing, configuration and customer management in one place

BEFORE

  • Dated but functional

  • Attempt to solve everything at once

  • Projects failed, trying to do too much at once

My Sales Activity started life in conflict.  The team was a long-standing, waterfall oriented, team that had direction from executives that were also waterfall.

My first job was to establish how this team would work in a more agile way.  We defined the MVP tasks that were doable in the time we had and a roadmap for extending the features to match current applications that were to be sunset.

Now I had to establish a design focused approach for breaking up stories.  Working with the requirements lead, we broke down the current functionality and created the first prototypes.

Once the business team understood the basics of agile requirements writing, we were able to create an experience that gave Business Partners a simplified experience and helped the process to sunset outdated tools.

This was done before a corporate design system had been established, so we used the internal colors and developed a consistent look and feel that gave the user a sense of where they were in the system of similar data.