If you are about to enter your CRM project’s User Acceptance Testing phase, here are my recommendations on UAT. These guidelines will help ensure that you capture feedback and deliver a great CRM experience for your clients, colleagues, and any wider stakeholder community.
1. Understand your processes.
Your CRM system has been designed with input from your key stakeholders. It is designed to securely store the information needed to manage all your relationships. It will also support your business processes, eliminating duplication of effort and ensuring everyone is “doing the right thing at the right time”. The definition of the right thing is based on your business process and industry best practices.
So, to UAT the system you will need to understand those business processes. The CRM should help you execute. If the process in CRM is incorrect – then it is worth checking what the Subject Matter Expert requested in the design workshops. Remember – they may know about changes in processes to support the organisations future strategy.
2. Test your process – have a script.
It is worth having a documented Test Script that describes each process. The process should include details of any data to be entered or checks that are required to progress to the next stage of the process.
3. Focus on the result and the desired outputs.
One of the benefits of having a script is that you can check that the system produces an expected result. Often, UAT becomes mired in the detail of how the process executes without identifying possible problems in the calculation of values. Check that the record you have added produces any report values required.
4. Found something that isn’t handled in the system? – ask how often it occurs.
What should you do if you identify that the system would not have handled something that happened in the past? Often as experienced users test new systems, they become sidetracked with previous issues.
Some of these issues relate to previous software, and others relate to specific circumstances. Whatever triggers the concern when you report it make sure that you provide some context. Do we need to re-engineer the entire process – or does the system need an exception-handling capability?
5. Problems with data – are only problems if the system generates the data.
Seen a record with wrong data – or incomplete data? Unless you are running UAT on migrated data, or on data calculated by the system, then this is NOT a UAT issue.
6. Now is not the time to identify changes – so look at how you can make the system work for you!
The big one! If the process is incorrect, then it is important to note where and why. It is even more important we do not use UAT to redesign our operational processes. Occasionally, what was requested in the design workshop and delivered in the software, reveals that the issue is with what was requested. Don’t redesign the requirement and request a change before you have looked at how you could make the delivered functionality work for you.
7. Having a longer UAT window rarely increases the amount, or quality, of testing.
Plan to have a short UAT window. Rarely have long periods of UAT increased the amount of time people spend testing. The key to UAT success for testers is to book time out in your diary, turn off your phone and email, and have intense periods of concentrated testing.
Plan to do most of the tests assigned to you in the first few days of UAT. Never leave testing to the end of UAT. Remember – issues you identify during UAT will be triaged, and the resolution may require a re-test, so plan to do another burst of UAT in the second week.
Seven rules that combine to ensure that your UAT becomes a key stage in the success of your CRM project.
