Before building a CRM, describe your working day
A simple application can keep contacts, enquiries, jobs and follow-up tasks in one workflow. Online payments and connections to other systems are not part of that starting scope. A useful brief starts with how you handle these things today. The starting price of this application is from 19,000 CZK.
Describe the journey of one job
Start when a new contact comes in. Who takes responsibility, where do they record the brief and how do they know what to do next? Continue through the quote and agreement to completion. Name the stages using words you already use.
Include common variations: missing materials, an enquiry put on hold or a change of date. These situations reveal what information people need to share. Use fictional data for the example; a simple sketch on paper is enough.
Connect related information
Distinguish between a contact, a company, a job and a task. One contact may be linked to several jobs, and several people may work on one job. Note which relationships you actually need. The information is entered in this one workflow. Connections to other systems are not part of the starting scope.
For each field, ask what you use it for. Who searches or makes decisions based on it? Mark the essential information and what can be added later. This helps define the forms and overviews you will actually use.
Define responsibilities and access
List the roles of the people who will use the system. Decide who can create a contact, change a job’s status, edit a price or delete a record. Specify which information a person can only view and which they can change.
Responsibility for the next step matters just as much. An open job should make clear who is handling it and what they are waiting for. Agree on handovers during absences and how to trace earlier changes. It is worth working through these situations during design.
Choose a complete first release
For the first release, choose a journey that can be followed from start to finish. It might include creating a contact, receiving an enquiry, assigning someone and viewing jobs in progress. List further features separately and set their priorities.
Try the proposed scope with a few sample cases. Check whether you can find the right record, understand its status and continue from it. The brief should also name who looks after the records, the initial data and how routine changes will be made. Online payments and connections to other systems are agreed separately, if you want them at all.
Have your own way of working? A short description can form the basis of a brief for a simple application.