PORTFOLIO SAMPLE

Customer Portal Launch

Conceive

Gateway Ticketing Systems, a small company that develops ecommerce and access-control software, had run into severe delays during the launch of its first online customer portal. The minimum viable product (MVP) was scheduled for launch in early March, but by the end of January two critical pieces were missing: the support desk and the single-sign-on (SSO) platforms. I had already completed my pieces of the customer portal—a learning management system and knowledge base—so the COO asked me to take over the rest of the launch and put it back on track.

A failure to launch on time would mean breaking commitments with third-party resellers and possibly suspending the project indefinitely. In order to persuade its resellers to accept a new pricing structure, Gateway had promised to provide a means for resellers to collaborate on customer tickets with Gateway’s own support staff by early March. However, there was a faction of the company strongly opposed to migrating away from its homebrew, desktop-based ticketing system. They would likely use a launch delay as an excuse for scuttling the customer portal and reseller agreements entirely.

With this urgency in mind, I immediately hammered out a new launch plan with the Customer Service, IT, Sales, and Marketing teams and began teaching myself how to configure the missing pieces.

Plan

First, I interviewed Gateway staff and members of the former project team to determine the user segments and use cases for the support desk. Fortunately, I had worked with the Customer Service team in the past while designing training and had even submitted several support tickets myself, so I already understood the users’ business context.

Externally, there were two user segments:

• Customers with single sites, who needed to submit tickets, upload attachments, monitor the tickets’ progress, receive notifications of updates, and post replies to Customer Service

• Enterprise customers and resellers supporting multiple sites, who needed to access tickets for those sites through a single account

Internally, there were four user segments:

• Customer Service representatives, who needed to submit tickets of their own, post replies to customers, post internal-only comments to other staff members, advance tickets through the support workflow, and see a prioritized view of their open tickets

• Customer Service managers, who needed to see real-time dashboards of departmental metrics

• Implementation consultants, who had the same needs as Customer Service representatives but for less frequent billable-support tickets, which followed a different workflow

• Account executives, who needed to browse support tickets by customer and receive update notifications on tickets of their choosing

Parallel to these interviews, I spoke with IT about the roadblocks with the SSO integration. The use case was simple: customers and employees should be able to authenticate once and be logged in to the three customer portal sites: the support desk, knowledge base, and learning management system. However, IT was having trouble simultaneously authenticating against two user directories (the employee directory and the customer directory). In addition, IT did not have the resources to automate account creation for new users.

In response to IT’s concerns, I committed to the following:

• Assisting with the configuration of Microsoft Active Directory Federated Services (ADFS), an SSO platform

• Outlining a manual process for creating new user accounts and finding a resource to follow it

With the user segments defined and the technical obstacles identified, I created a cross-departmental project plan. In addition to the steps for the technical deployment, I outlined a communication plan for all user segments and then selected customers to invite to an MVP pilot test in March.

Develop

Before configuring the customer portal, I had to learn the software. For its support desk solution, the company had chosen Jira Service Desk, a product I had never used. The staff originally charged with configuring it had attended a week-long training session, but with the deadline approaching I had to just read the documentation, experiment in the sandbox environment, and Google my questions. The company did have a Jira consultant on retainer, but when he was unable to help with a show-stopping system error, I had to wipe the configuration and rebuild it one step at a time until I found the cause.

With an understanding of the software, I began configuring the use cases I had outlined earlier. The previous project team had drafted a labyrinthine workflow with over a dozen states; I cut out anything that wasn’t absolutely necessary for a use case. I also ensured the states and transitions had clear names and contextual help so that users could navigate the workflow with minimal training. Some use cases, such as the multi-site enterprise configuration, required that I hunt for a solution in the plug-in marketplace, learn the Jira database structure, and write SQL queries.

During the course of the configuration, users raised additional use cases, such as processing hardware repairs and requests for web-theme changes. Since these cases were not critical to launching the platform, I added them to the backlog.

Configuring the SSO also involved several technologies I hadn’t used before. In addition to ADFS, I had to learn basic Linux and Windows PowerShell, as well as an authentication middleware called GLUU. Through Googling and trial-and-error, I configured the pieces that IT had been missing. I also documented the account creation process for each customer portal site step-by-step and imported the first hundred users myself.

Once everything was configured, I asked members of the Customer Service team to walk through the steps for submitting and resolving a support ticket. I then revised the configuration, documented it, wrote thorough QA checklists, oversaw an accelerated user-acceptance testing, and trained every internal user.

With all of the testing complete, I invited our pilot-test customers to the customer portal by the COO’s March deadline, just six weeks from when I had been assigned the project.