CRM extended ALM - TFS Connector

The Manifesto for Agile Software Development was published in 2001 to define the approach known as agile software development. One of the principles behind the agile manifesto indicates that the highest priority of software projects is to satisfy the customer’s needs through early and continuous delivery of valuable software. This statement has a big impact on the working routines of both software development departments and functional departments, because it implies a total customer-driven business strategy.

The process of becoming a customer-driven IT company requires changes in business strategy and routines, but also in the design-approach of information systems. An integrated IT landscape has to be established to provide the necessary information for agile software development and successful sales. Nowadays the standard working environments for developers are application lifecycle management systems (ALM), which include functionality for version control, task-, bug-, build-, delivery and test management. Sales people use customer relationship management (CRM) systems which include functionality especially for sales automation. In this scenario a nonintegrated IT landscape leads to an information gap and communication overload between sales department and software development. As a consequence customer requirements are often misunderstood and the wrong information is communicated.

Illustration: Typical communication problems, without CRM extended ALM

Typical communication problems, without CRM extended ALM

To solve these problems PROLAN initiated the approach of CRM extended ALM. This approach combines the customer lifecycle management and the application lifecycle management by integrating the previous mentioned IT systems. It puts the sales persons in the comfortable position to be able to access information about current development processes, new features and bug fixing without requesting them asynchronously from the development department. Additionally, it represents a single point of information for the programmers. The Sales and Service departments escalate CRM cases, bugs and problems as work items directly to the development team.

TFS-Workitem-in-CRM

Example: TFS Workitem in CRM 2011, Areas and Iterations from TFS, Customer-Project Relation from CRM

The technical architecture is based on Microsoft technologies. The Team Foundation Server as application for managing the software development process is integrated with Microsoft Dynamics CRM, one of the leading CRM-Systems on the market. Bidirectional integration enables data sharing between these systems.

CRM-TFS-Connector

CRM extended ALM supports the transformation of an IT company towards an agile and customer-driven organization. In addition to an IT-Consulting team, PROLAN has a software development team and is aware of their specific challenges. This is the reason why PROLAN is the right partner to support you with your process of integrating CRM with your software development team.

See more CRM Services from PROLAN (german)

 

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