Field research project outline - Ethnographic study of a team prior to toolset migration

The objective of this study is to understand Company A’s usage of their current Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool to better prepare for the transition to a new web-based CRM tool. This study is necessary because Company A has put a lot of Engineering effort into integrating their current CRM tool into their own systems, as well as built years of workflow around the tools feature set

Of all departments in Company A, three departments have direct contact with the CRM tool - Customer Support (CS for short), with over 80 employees whose workflow is entirely centered around the tool and its integration into the Internal System (known internally as Ninjas), Operations, who have their own toolset (mostly developed in-house) but use the CRM tool to communicate with CS, who then act as a buffer between operations and customers themselves and Compliance, who, like Operations, have their own toolsets but make use of the CRM tool to communicate with CS and, sometimes, to customers themselves.

As the new CRM tool possesses all features of the current one (either a direct equivalent or an analogue feature that achieves the same results) and lots of new features, this ethnographic investigation’s short-term goal are:

1. To understand how each team relates to the CRM tool
2. To catalog all features used by each team
3. To understand if the same workflows are approached differently by each team

To achieve this goal we intend to employ shadowing: the researcher will shadow one member of each concerned team during one hour of work. No information will be shared with the subjects on what the goals of the study are and they'll be asked to work normally and pay no regard to the researcher. The researcher will make notes during this time of every single action taken during the completion of their tasks, what tools are used and how information is conveyed between different tools.

The longer-term goals are to use this information to:

1. Draft a migration plan that focuses Engineering resources on critical features first
2. Ensure that the new CRM tool is configured to make workflow migration (as) seamless (as possible)
3. Understand how to make better use of features not yet available in the current CRM tool to improve the current workflow once the new tool is available
4. Draft training material for current and new team members on using the new tool