Training Day 1 - Provision CRM

After almost exactly a year of planning and development, today was the start of our staff training on ProVision CRM.  Today's focus (and a couple more days this week) is for our IT staff and a select group who will become our early adopters, or MVPs.  These are the trail blazers who will break the system in, work through the likely kinks, and then be available to help others on the staff as we do the wider deployment over the next few weeks and months.

We did two parts of training today.  A fairly large introduction for about 40 people (below), then some hands on training for about half that group, with plans for the others to go through hands-on time after Thanksgiving.

Steve Bauserman (ACTS group) showed off lots of features of Provision. There were [at least] three major recurring themes:

1. Familiarity of the interface.  (In years past, I might have said "easy" or "friendly," but that's really not the point)  ProVision is built on Microsoft CRM, so the interface is primarily the same as Outlook, which is the key product our staff "lives in" every day.  So, love Outlook, or Hate it, if you use it, then you're already a long way to being ready to use ProVision.
2. A "right place" for each type of data.  ProVision CRM lets you pull all your data into one place, eliminating those ad-hoc, one-off, "temporary" data collecting points.  To put it into TBYL terms, the number of collecting points is reduced.
3. Sharing.  Somewhat the counter-point to the single collection point idea, if you really do put things into the database, just once, everyone on staff can benefit from knowing where to find things.  Imagine knowing that your fellow staff member actually called a person last week, so you don't have to call for the same reason.

Training continues Tuesday and Wednesday.  It's going to be a busy week!

 

Comments

[richard Dolan]

Kudos to you, Whitney, and the rest of the Perimeter team for your hard work, planning, and energy invested to get this right -- I'm sure there will be great benefits for Perimeter and other churches who adopt ProvisionCRM as a result of your time!