Author Topic: Project CiviCRM in Dutch housing corporation (Read 13034 times)

Erik Hommel · September 22, 2009, 05:37:07 am

Thursday 10th September we had the kick off of our first CiviCRM project with housing corporation 'De Goede Woning' in Apeldoorn (The Netherlands).

I will update this showcase on a weekly basis as this is our first CiviCRM project. Those of you that speak Dutch: www.opencorporatie.nl or www.ee-atwork.nl for the original blog. As far as I know it is the first Dutch housing corporation that is going to use Open Source software around customer relationships.

Background of the project:

De Goede Woning has been contemplating customer information and CRM for some time, as do a lot of Dutch housing corporations. They found out that a lot of suppliers are very happy to tell them what kind functionality they have, but De Goede Woning is not too sure about what they really want, what is really important for them. And experts designing the world and thinking about all they might want to know and need in the future is abit over the top...
So talking about this with us they have decided to start a prototype project with the following steps:

a dreamsession in which we describe what we see once we have this wonderful customer information system eeveryone is talking about. Close you eyes and tell me what you see!
touchdown on earth: what can we do tomorrow moving towards that dream, and what steps will matter the most and cost the least effort
prototype the most important ones in CiviCRM
recommend further actions based on the experience

The goal is NOT to implement a system, the goal is to know what we have to do to get moving towards our dream. And it could well be that they decide to continue using CiviCRM (yesssss!!!!) and start a real implemenation project, but it is not sure. In my opinion this approach is one of the great advantages of Open Source software, it is relatively cheap to start a prototype. No license cost and no supplier to keep nagging you why you decide what you decide...

Last week we installed Drupal 6.14 and CiviCRM 3.0beta4 on their server and changed some of the settings to suit their needs. Coming Thursday will be our dreaming session, I will keep you posted here!

Erik

Erik Hommel · September 29, 2009, 12:30:57 pm

Last week we had our dream session with the people at De Goede Woning. The dream was: to have information on contacts (customers, suppliers, partners, organisations etc.) available wherever we are (at our desk, out on the street, with a customer) where the context determines which information is at the front.

Having defined the dream, we discussed what steps we could take tomorrow to move towards this dream, and came up with:

share the information we already have in our departments or individual files
collect social information on our customers (what are the local institutions, sports clubs, police representatives etc.)
start entering information on all our customer contacts that are relevant to our colleagues and processes

On top of this, we changed some settings to reflect the needs of Dutch housing corporations, translated some details in the database that are not translated yet and started modifying some of the standard templates (mainly translating and some customizing). Next week will be the first group feel of CiviCRM!
Erik

Erik Hommel · October 08, 2009, 09:09:56 am

Today (8 Oct) was a "De Goede Woning" day. The projectgroup members had produced a number of cases, which we will act out in CiviCRM in the coming weeks. We are using 3.0 beta4 with Drupal 6.14.
This morning we presented CiviCRM for the first time to the project group, and acted out one case. This involved creating a household with a number of individuals, creating "De Goede Woning' as an organization with individuals as employees, relating the employee to their bunch of customers. And finally setting up a social institute with employees, and thus creating a set of relationships of a household with the involved partners and individuals. We also created a number of groups for employees, people that rent property, buy property, are part of projects etc. A good day!!!!

Erik Hommel · October 14, 2009, 11:39:47 pm

This week the projectmembers of the project at "De Goede Woning" started using CiviCRM themselves. They all have a testcase with a detailed live example of a 'problem' situation. In this case the start situation is described, and all the steps they then take with the information they want to store or want to see. And yesterday we sat them down to start playing out their case in CiviCRM. With their case they had to enter housholds, individuals and organisations, decide on groups and relationtypes and use them to link, decide what data had to be loaded from other systems etc. And to our satisfaction the project group members were quite enthusiastic.
One thing that we noticed especially was that they were able to find their way without any formal training! We showed them one case last week, and off they went....and of course they came up with questions, but the whole lot was quite intuitive!

On the technical side I am now working on an import script to get data on contacts from their main system and import it in CiviCRM. Eventually an interface like that will be required on a daily basis as they will continue to do their transactions in their main system.

xavier · October 15, 2009, 12:14:53 am

Thanks for sharing.

Where they "always" the same questions coming up ? If this is the case, could you list the top ones, it's probably a sign that something isn't clear in the interface and could be improved.

Erik Hommel · October 15, 2009, 12:18:20 am

Hi Xavier,
none of the questions so far had to do with the interface. The questions were mainly on the contact types (they are not used to make a distinction between individuals and households) and the way to link them using the relationtypes. But I will certainly keep listening.....we will after a couple of weeks make a list of actions to do with localization.

Erik Hommel · October 28, 2009, 02:24:46 am

Last week we played some more with standard CiviCRM. We did add some specific data:
Households

unit the household is renting
startdate and enddate of the contract
rent amount

Individuals

civil number (something Dutch that uniquely identifies individuals). This might be something generic?
marital status. This might be something generic

Organizations

VAT number

All these fields are populated from their main system, and can only be viewed. I have developed a specific interface scripts between their main system and CiviCRM.

This week we also demonstrated and discussed CiviCASE, which was received pretty enthusiastically. We set up 2 different types of cases, and played with activities.

What we did notice is that the users find it very hard to come up with what they want to achieve with customer information. They express the wish to let us show what they can do, and then decide if they want it. From our perspective, that will not lead to any success as they have nothing to achieve! So we continue to guide them towards: what do you want, which process will perform better, how will you have better knowledge of your customer/client, how do we improve the balance between what we offer and what our clients need? Interesting!!!!

Erik Hommel · October 28, 2009, 02:35:01 am

By the way, if anyone is interested in the details of the interface I developed, just let me know!!!

Erik Hommel · October 30, 2009, 01:59:12 am

This comment was posted on LinkedIn by one of the customers (I have translated it :-))

Quote

I was honered to have a look in the CiviCRM kitchen. As a colleague, not as a project member, I have followed the developments tightly. The prototype offers us fantastic possibilities in finally letting go of the 'thinking in stones' and transforming to 'thinking in customers'! And to think this open source solution is free of charge!!

Dave Greenberg · October 30, 2009, 10:43:39 am

Quote from: Erik Hommel on October 28, 2009, 02:35:01 am

By the way, if anyone is interested in the details of the interface I developed, just let me know!!!

I'd be interested, and probably others too. Perhaps a blog post w/ some screenshots would be a good way to share the use cases and your solutions??

Erik Hommel · October 30, 2009, 11:18:49 am

Will do!

Erik Hommel · October 30, 2009, 11:20:21 am

Having said that, I don't think I can do blog post yet here, should I mail one?

Donald Lobo · October 30, 2009, 11:44:30 am

just gave u blogging permissions

http://civicrm.org/blog/5646/

u can create a blog entry from there

lobo

Erik Hommel · October 30, 2009, 12:59:36 pm

Thanks, I will get my thoughts together and make some nice screenprints first. For anyone speaking Dutch: www.ee-atwork.nl or www.opencorporatie.nl

Erik Hommel · November 02, 2009, 10:23:04 am

A first shot at a movie about a Case Type in CiviCRM we set up for De Goede Woning:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rigGLqSOgw

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Author Topic: Project CiviCRM in Dutch housing corporation (Read 13034 times)

Erik Hommel

Project CiviCRM in Dutch housing corporation

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