ProdCast: Kids as a Productivity Hack?

Wouldn’t it sound crazy to suggest that having kids makes you more productive? Neither Joel nor Matt recommend being re-productive solely for the purpose of becoming personally-productive, however they do have some interesting points of how kids shift the perspective on productivity.

http://prodcast.libsyn.com/prodcast-13-kids-and-the-power-of-a-deadline

Subscribe to the Podcast: Apple Podcasts | Google Play | RSS

ProdCast: PC vs Mobile email

Processing email is a constant need, is it best to keep on top of it via your mobile phone? Joel and Matt talk about how they try to deal with this.

http://prodcast.libsyn.com/prodcast-11-mobile-vs-pc-email
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Subscribe to the Podcast: Apple Podcasts | Google Play | RSS

Drive Higher User Adoption with Learning Path in Dynamics 365

When deploying or upgrading a relationship management system, success of the project often hinges on people actually using the system. In fact, according to the February 2016 Forrester report, CRM Success Hinges On Effective Change Management, 46% of those surveyed Agree or Strongly Agree that user adoption struggles were encountered during their CRM implementation. This is where Learning Path can help.

Effective change management helps address this area, especially when users have easy and contextual access to resources like training walk-throughs, cheat sheets, and videos.

With Microsoft’s recent addition of Dynamics 365 release of their customer engagement capabilities (sales, service, and marketing) they have included a killer tool for providing the right help/reminders at the right time: Learning Path for Dynamics 365.

Tailor Guided Tasks to your processes to drive user adoption

Deployments of Microsoft Dynamics 365 typically include configuration. You add fields to forms and update business process flows to support the way your company operates. These updates make the system speak your language and drive your processes—and these are exactly the things that should be reinforced inside of the system (without having to search for documents held in a different system or dig around for printout reference cards).

Dynamics 365 Learning Path provides this personalized step-by-step help. Users are literally walked through a scenario with guidance on where to click and what type of information to enter.

A key enabler is that this guidance can span multiple pages. For instance, moving through a sales process may involve work with a Lead, Opportunity, Account (etc.) and part of learning this relationship is to move between records at the right time. Learning Paths allow you to show how and when to move between records.

It’s also worth noting that once users are comfortable with using the system, they can opt-out of this guidance. This means people won’t feel “nagged” about how to use the system after they’ve become familiar with it.

Reinforce training with Learning Path sidebar self-serve help

Walk-through guidance on its own is helpful up to a point but sometimes you’ll need to provide additional reference material. There is a balance between the amount of content on the page and the depth that people might need.

Too much information with every step can make an otherwise simple system seem cluttered and confusing. Learning Path has a great way to handle this with an expanding sidebar where you can provide this self-service material.

Examples include:

– Videos

– Slides

– Checklists

– Links to other content (e.g. SharePoint content)

Tying these tools back to user adoption

Training and communication are important aspects of driving effective change in an organization and Learning Paths provides ways to engage with users right inside of the application. There are plenty of uses, but here are a few examples to get the ideas flowing.

Set up walkthroughs so users can follow along during initial training (and reference them later) – This is especially helpful when users are very unfamiliar with both the system and the process. It’s also a great way to help in training where there is a high student to instructor ratio.

Use Learning Path when introducing new or updated processes – As usage of the system grows there will undoubtedly be tweaks made to the way information is displayed on the form or how the business process flow progresses. Offer new and updated Learning Paths to help support these changes.

Create role-specific content when it’s useful – Learning Paths recognizes who the individual user is, providing them the appropriate context based on their security roles. So, for example, when looking at a Contact record a sales rep and customer service rep could see different content that helps them with different processes and key information relevant to their role.

Regularly update sidebar content to include answers to frequently asked questions – the nature of learning paths makes them a great first-stop for this kind of information. Make this an easy (and in-context) place to provide answers to FAQs

Embrace the configurability and personalization of Learning Paths and iterate, iterate, iterate! Even well-planned changes will have bumps in the road—don’t look at these as static content. Consider including a link to submit questions if your current content doesn’t cover something.

This post originally appeared on the RBA blog.

The AppSource Experience for Dynamics 365

AppSource as a great end-user experience

Taking some user experience cues from the Xbox Marketplace

Evernote Mobile Update – What About Android?

I usually see a lot of variety in my news feed, but one unexpected story that’s taken off is the release of the new Evernote mobile app for iOS earlier this week. I’m a big fan of Evernote, but I didn’t realize or appreciate the pain that my Apple-phoned friends were experiencing with their experience with the app. This got me thinking about the Evernote app for Android and why my experience is so good.

Evernote did its latest major release of the Android mobile app in mid-2016. I remember the user experience improvements that came with the update, as the whole app was a bit faster and less cumbersome. After over half a year of usage, I’m still really happy with this version. I’m not alone either. As of this post, the app has 4.5 stars on Google Play Store (with over 1.4mm votes).

There are a handful of things I love that make the app such a pleasure to use…

The Step-Saving Evernote Action Bar

Yes, it’s actually that prominent on my home screen

From my home screen in Android, I have several easy-to-select actions that are hooked into Evernote. By tapping any one of these buttons (or the elephant head) I can capture a specific type of note without even having to open the Evernote app.

This makes good use of a key difference I really appreciate in Android that is lacking on the iOS platform: Adding widgets to the home screen. In iOS when you go to the main screen, you see icons that launch your apps (and maybe folders with apps in them). This is perfectly fine and does help make sure you can quickly get to a large number of apps. That is, of course, assuming that

Similarly in Android, the icons that launch apps are front-and-center. However, in Android, if you want to include special widgets that have special functionality. In the case of Evernote, they have a few widgets, my favorite of which is the Evernote Action Bar.

When adding it, you get to control which quick actions are shown (and what order they’re in). You can control the order, too. One of these options, the “Quick Note” doesn’t even open the app, it just provides a simple box where I can enter a title and/or note text. This is lightning fast, and each of the icons in the Evernote Action Bar saves a few seconds every time I use it—which adds up.

For those who are familiar, the Evernote Action Bar itself was not totally new with this release, however, it became part of the core application (rather than a separate “Evernote Widget” app that needed to be installed). The simplicity of having everything in the one app is important!

The app design is simple but powerful

Over the last near-decade, I’ve seen the Evernote service grow–which brings opportunity to overload the user interface with too much stuff. With various releases of the Evernote mobile app, this has been one of the biggest challenges. The Android app was updated in the middle of 2016 and re-introduced this simplicity. From what I’ve read (and seen) this is exactly what this week’s iOS release was all about. Finding ways to simplify the user experience to make it fast and more intuitive. Here are a few examples from the Android app:

• The first screen you interact with is all about notes
• New note button perfect location for right thumb, and tapping on it lets you pick the type of note to capture (text, photo, audio, etc.)
• Swiping from the left brings access to notebooks, shortcuts, tags, and, most importantly, search.
• The quick note in the Action Bar doesn’t force me into the app–saving on load time and distraction 🙂

Looking through some of the screenshots on Android

Final thoughts

Despite the fact that my primary phone is an Android, I’m glad to see that the iOS experience has been updated. The more happy Evernote users are out there, the more stability they have as a company, allowing them to innovate. I’m actually quite excited to see some of their upcoming offerings that will leverage machine learning to improve the user experience.

Are there other things you want to know about Evernote mobile or what their service is like? Let me know in the comments!

Three ways Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015 Will Speed Up Quoting

During my time in sales operations, a constant frustration is that quoting can be a real hassle inside of any CRM system. There are some great tools that help with making certain aspects like configuration much easier, but at the end of the day this is an area that can always be improved (both as the person doing the quoting as well as the person managing what can be quoted).

The recent announcement of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015, which is scheduled to come out in December 2014, comes with exciting updates to quoting products or services. I’ve submitted a blog post Three Ways Dynamics CRM 2015 Will Speed Up Quoting to the Hitachi Solutions CRM blog.

I recently learned that reposting the same article content to multiple blogs can actually hurt your search engine rankings, so you’ll have to jump to the full article via the link (re-linked here) 🙂

Dynamics CRM 2015 Preview: Sales Process Enhancements

Anyone who has talked to me about the last two releases of Dynamics CRM knows that I am a huge believer in the Sales Process functionality that Microsoft has developed. I think back to my Sales Operations days and can only shake my head at how much screwing around could have been avoided if this toolset was available today (for sales reps and for my team).

The picture doesn’t do justice to the concept…but you can click to enlarge the image which will help a little bit.

The CRM 2015 release preview brings even more excitement, as there are even more strides in the ability to guide users through a business process flow. In the last release, we were still limited to a very linear process flow. If there were indicators on an Opportunity that certain stages should be skipped or handled in a different order, it took lots of time for a clever BA or some custom development from an IT pro to make that happen. If the business wasn’t willing to invest in that, then the burden fell to the salesperson to “just know” what was relevant (which meant some people filled in everything while others filled out nothing…garbage data).

Soon, a simple configuration will allow conditional branching to stages based on criteria specified by the process. This capability will be baked right into the 2015 process flow designer, To the right I’ve included an image from the preview guide showing this conditional branching, which should layer very nicely with the existing Business Rules to show/hide relevant fields..

What this means is an even more intuitive experience for the business development team. Fewer refreshes and flickers on the page. Ask only for what’s needed…automate the rest. Get the management team the detail they need for forecasting and decisions, without burdening the sales organization with a bunch of busywork. This is useful in a variety of situations, including:

• Handling variations for different types of sales (inside sales, add-ons, contract renewals, etc.)
• Time to productivity when onboarding new salespeople
• Managing sales cycles that vary if they have a short-fuse or time-based incentives

Keep it coming Microsoft Dynamics CRM Team!

Note: In this post I discuss future products and features that have been announced publicly but it is always important to remember that this is subject to change with the final release

Microsoft Announces CRM 2015 Details

Hot off the presses, Microsoft has announced Dynamics CRM 2015 and posted some pre-release information out to their CRM customer center website. This includes updates to both Dynamics CRM as well as Dynamics Marketing.

Here are some particulars of note:

• A specific release date has not been described, however they have specified “before the end of this calendar year”
• CRM Online customers will be able to drive the specific timing of the upgrade for their organization. This is similar to the 2013 update for SP1 and they point toward the same technet article on how this works
• CRM On-premise customers will be able to apply the update as they normally would (assuming they have software assurance)
• Dynamics CRM functionality updates hit the sales process, mobile (tablet) experience, product detail, case management, Outlook, and the help system
• Dynamics Marketing functionality updates will provide several updates around what will be a more collaborative experience for users

As a partner and member of the CRM community, I’d like to offer this reminder to folks: back when MS announced the CRM 2013 Service Pack 1 (Spring 14 release) they also mentioned that there will be several changes in what the platform supports “for the next release” which they were terming the Fall Release, but is now (which is now called CRM 2015). Read the details over on the Dynamics CRM Blog to make sure you’re aware of some prep-work that may need to take place before upgrading to CRM 2015.

Microsoft’s Acquisition of Parature Announced

Microsoft has announced as of January 30, 2014 that is has reached an agreement to acquire Parature to help strengthen the customer service and service portal capabilities in the Dynamics product family.

At the beginning of 2013, Microsoft and Parature announced an alliance to deliver solutions. While there hasn’t been a lot of chirping around that relationship, the offering must have had some good appeal to warrant an acquisition.

Bob Stutz, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Dynamics CRM, has a blog post to offer his thoughts that accompanies the press release.

Tough to say at this point exactly how much Parature they’ll be showing at Convergence here in a month, but there will certainly be a buzz about it.

Microsoft Goes Gangbusters with Team Blog Posts

I’ve been a long time subscriber to the MS CRM team blog and the last year and a half has been pretty quiet.

With the release of CRM 2013 last month that’s all changed! They’ve published over 20 posts covering various aspects of the new release ranging from general functionality to technical deep dives. The content is jam-packed with information and I’d venture a guess that there will be more coming. Keep your eyes on the CRM team blog out on MSDN.

With the holiday season coming up, I’m planning on spending some time to highlight some of the more useful items buried inside of these posts.