The Site Visit Scheduling Saga

Over the last month, requests for site visit scheduling hit an all-time high.  (For those of you that are newer, site visits are one of the methods of customer discovery we began using this year to understand what our customers are trying to accomplish and what we need to create to help them meet those objectives. When we visit a customer in their own environment, we refer to this as a site visit.)

In addition to the requests for site visits, came also the need for project teams to stay up to date on which customers were being called when and what visits were actually confirmed.  It became clear really fast that we needed a tool.
 
So Connie, Linda, Sara and I got together and started with the standard UCD (User Centered Design) question:

What are our (internal) customers trying to do? OR

 What are the specific tasks they need to complete?

KEY TASKS team members needed to be able to complete: 

1. Check to see if there are any visits coming up
2. Check to see who else was going on a particular site visit and if there was availability
3. Check to see the focus of the site visits
4. Check the status of communication with sites being contacted for visits
5. Check to see how recently a particular site was contacted or visited in relation to any project
6. Sales Team also needed to be able to see what communication was happening with sites in their territory

 

KEY REQUIREMENTS the tool must meet to ensure team members can carry out their tasks:

1.    It needed to be easily accessed by EVERYONE on project teams

2.    It needed to be easily updated by ANY project team member

3.    It needed to be easily sorted however the user wishes to see the data (by project, data, site name, diocese)

4.    Must be able to see the Diocese that each site belongs to 

Now, with the above tasks and requirements we created the first iteration of the SITE VISIT SCHEDULER TOOL (an internal spreadsheet) where project teams and employees can go to see what is happening with site visits.

Keep in mind, in user-centered design, we DO—DISCOVER—ITERATE.  So, we created the tool, we’ll discover how it works and we’ll move on to the next iteration.

So, try those tasks (from above) & check the status of those visits!

(Check your e-mail for the tool link.)