Writing the Business Requirements Document – A System Integration Case Study

Disclaimer

Companies  mentioned in this case study are fictitious and are for educational purposes only. Scenarios, events and names mentioned in this case study are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, corporations or institutions are purely coincidental.

Background:

RiverCorp sells equipment  to automotive manufacturers all over the world. They use  a number of systems to manage their business.

One such system is Salesforce, which is used to manage their clients, accounts and opportunities.

Another system is WinRate, used in addition to Salesforce to manage their opportunities and help them to close new deals faster.

WinRate is a visual tool that includes a number of features such as relationship maps, tasks, documents  and charts to help get better visibility into opportunities in order to improve the likelihood of winning each deal against the competitors.  WinRate is integrated with Salesforce via an API such that it syncs information between the two systems. Tasks and opportunity details are synced between Salesforce and WinRate, whereas relationship maps, charts and insights on deals are managed only in WinRate.

The Problem:

Since the pandemic, all RiverCorp employees  started working remotely and started using Microsoft Teams (MS Teams) as a major means of communication. Microsoft Teams is a tool that is mainly used for chat conversations and file sharing. Whereas this is great for collaboration, it is causing some problems for opportunity management as conversations in MS Teams often include tasks to be done in order to close deals but these are not being sent to  WinRate where these kinds of tasks are expected to be managed.  Therefore MS Teams has become a heavily used but very isolated system that leaves a burden on the sales teams to manually enter tasks discussed within Teams into WinRate. It is causing a disruption in their sales process and negatively impacting team efficiency.

Ideally, once the sales person puts the task in WinRate, it is pushed to salesforce and both systems will then be in sync however it is a challenge to get the sales team to remember to transfer their tasks out of team chats to WinRate. Teams is isolated and disconnected from the process but very useful for collaboration. Sales people often forget to transfer the information they discuss in teams into the relevant system of record.

One example of the problem this causes can be seen when the account manager had a meeting with a major prospect. Ahead of the meeting, he met with his account team, checked in WinRate and also checked in Salesforce and saw that everything was ok with the account. What he did not realize was that there were a number of items to be done that was discussed in the Teams channel for that account but not transferred to WinRate ( thus not pushed to Salesforce ) and  no one on the team had caught this ahead of the meeting.

When he went into the meeting with the prospect and they  asked about the deliverables they were promised, he was blindsided and did not have anything to show to them. That gave RiverCorp a bad impression with the prospect, which could have cost them the deal –  almost loosing millions of dollars in potential revenue!

The Decision:

This problem has become so great that RiverCorp sales executive management has reached out to the executive sponsors of  Microsoft, WinRate and Salesforce to find out if they had any integrations that could help solution to this problem.

There is already an integration for Teams with Salesforce, however, because of how RiverCorp’s sales process works, the integration directly between Salesforce and MS Teams does not solve the issues they are facing today. Getting the tasks out of team chats and into WinRate is the problem RiverCorp executives are trying to solve. WinRate is where they want to consolidate the opportunity planning and task management activtities.

The decision was made then that the best course of action is that WinRate would build an integration to Teams and  that would allow all three systems to talk to each other without much change to the existing sales process at RiverCorp.

The Expectation:

WinRate will provide an integration to MS Teams that will specifically  allow RiverCorp sales people to be able to:

1. Assign items in Teams and have it reflected in WinRate. This includes:
   •  Create a task from a chat and see the task in WinRate
   • Add a note from a Teams conversation as a note on the opportunity in WinRate
   • Ability to upload a document from Teams and have it added to the opportunity in WinRate
2. See conversations from Teams in the WinRate  opportunity page.  This includes:
   • Be able to mention someone using  @username and have that teams chat show up  when viewing the opportunity in WinRate
   • Having the WinRate user see all the opportunities they were mentioned on
3. Be able to open WinRate in a Teams tab so that while inside Teams, users can quickly access WinRate without having to open a separate application.

RiverCorp is expecting that all information  on the opportunity details and tasks continue to be synced between WinRate and Salesforce  as they do today after the new integration of Teams and WinRate is done.

You are employed as the business analyst at WinRate and this has just become your next project. Create a requirements document that would help the developers know what to build.

General:

Feel free to solve this problem as you see fit, including designing the WinRate system as you wish. You can get a free version of Teams to see how it works.

Resources:

Sales Opportunities:

• https://www.tenfold.com/what-is-a-sales-opportunity
• Lead vs Prospect vs Opportunity
• Opportunity stages

Microsoft Teams:

• What is Microsoft Teams?
• How to use Microsoft Teams?
• Download: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-teams/teams-for-home
• Teams API Documentation: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/api/resources/team?view=graph-rest-1.0
  • ( you can use this to know what is possible with the Teams API so you can know what features you can include in your design – you do not need to get into the code or any specific implementation)

Salesforce Opportunities:

• https://www.salesforceben.com/best-practices-for-the-opportunity-object/
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPARicXKhS8
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEsXPBOpfQc

Systems similar to WinRate:

System similar to WinRate: User Manual

Note from Karaleise:

This is a highly technical case study. This does not require prior knowledge of Salesforce or Microsoft Teams but that would help. WinRate is a fictitious system but this would be a great opportunity to design it as you wish and practice creating mockups. Writing this requirements document would result in a work sample you can use in future interviews and job applications.

Sign up to my mailing list to get details on the results of this case study.