Data Collection Steps

The researcher changed the frequency of interview rounds after the first case study. He decided to go for monthly interviews instead of the two rounds held in June 2008 and November 2009 for the initial research. Beside this single but significant difference, the overall data collection process remained the same throughout the three cases. The researcher will now present the process followed during the first case study, and then explain the changes brought during the second and third cases.

For the first case study, the researcher conducted the data collection process in three steps. He initially collected internal project documents during step one, and then held two rounds of in-depth interviews in Bucharest in June 2008 and November 2009 (steps two and three). In addition, he interviewed the local project manager after each interview round in order to discuss his preliminary findings. He also held two additional meetings with the CRM global project team at the company’s headquarters in Geneva (Switzerland): one at the beginning of the research (April 2008) to get an overall understanding of the company’s objectives for implementing a TMS, and another one at the end of the research (January 2010) in order to present his conclusions and obtain company’s feedback. During the research, the local project manager gathered monthly system log data and sent them to the researcher. The three data collection steps are briefly described below.

Before starting the interview process in Romania, the researcher scheduled an introductory meeting with the global CRM project manager in Geneva. His objectives were to gain a better understanding of the reasons, objectives and organisation of the TMS project, to identify the main TMS user types, and to gather training documentation and project meetings’ minutes in order to learn more about the deployed TMS functionalities, the supported business processes and the challenges faced during the pre ‘go-live’ phase. He learned that the main objectives of the TMS project were to increase the efficiency of the field marketing staff, to improve the quality of collected customer data, to bring online reporting capabilities to field staff, and to replace the ageing legacy CRM platform with a more modern and customizable technology. Before the researcher’s first onsite visit, the Romanian project manager briefed local management and interviewees about the goal of the research and the data collection process. Additionally, the researcher spent five minutes at the beginning of each interview introducing the research process and objectives. The researcher believed that it was essential that informants were approached tactfully and informed about the general nature of the research in order to gain trust (Goulding, 2002; Silverman, 2006).

For the first round of interviews (June 2008), the researcher used a semi- structured interview to conduct the interviews (Table 2). The questions covered the main subjects of the research, namely usage, usage evolution and its influencing factors. The questions were deliberately left open-ended so that at this early stage of the research no preconceived perceptions or opinions could influence the interviewees’ answers. Moreover, even though the semi-structured questionnaire initially included nine questions, interviewees were allowed to jump from one area to another and talk about issues unrelated to the introduction of the tool. Glaser and Strauss (1967) and Glaser (1978, 1992, 1998) recommended this approach in order to let concepts “emerge” rather than “forcing” them into predefined categories derived from the experience of the researcher or his/her initial review of the literature. Thus, the first interview question (“What do you feel about the introduction of the TMS tool?”) allowed interviewees to speak about the introduction of the TMS tool in general, before being introduced to the specific areas of the research.

1 What are your job function and main activities? 2 How long have you been working for the company? 3 What do you feel about the introduction of the TMS? 4 Were you using a similar tool previously?

5 Which TMS functionalities do you use?

Which ones don’t you use? Please explain why. 6 What are the TMS advantages and disadvantages?

How do you plan to overcome the issues (if any) you just raised?

7 Does the TMS help you better do your job and achieve your objectives? Please explain.

8 Have you seen any evolution in your TMS usage since its deployment? What about in the future?

9 What do you see as factors (related to you, your company, your industry) influencing your usage, currently or in the future?

Table 2. Semi-Structured Interview (Case 1, First Round)

The initial sample of eight interviewees included the main representatives of the project team (the business and technical project managers), as well as key members of the user groups (management, TMAs, Leisure Channel Associates [LCAs], and the planning team). Eight people were considered as an optimal number for this first round, considering that the researcher had only two full days available in Bucharest. This left enough time between the interviews to immediately record notes, first impressions and comments. For the second round of interviews (November 2009), seven out of the eight people already interviewed participated again. An LCA did not show up for the interview. The researcher interviewed two additional managers in the marketing department in order to better understand their role and their impact on usage, as the role of management was found to be a key element affecting usage during the initial interview round. The researcher taped interviews for both rounds of interviews. However, he only transcribed interviews conducted in 2008. For the second round, he merely took notes during and just after interviews in order to record any insightful remarks from interviewees. The second questionnaire (Table 3) was more structured than the one used in the June 2008 round in order to allow a more direct follow-up on the initial findings. Interviewees were still allowed to cover personal topics of interest regarding usage and contextual factors even if not originally included in the questionnaire. The identification of post-adoption usage phases, the localization of users within those phases, the discovery of new factors influencing usage, their evolution over time and the assessment of benefits generated by the introduction of the TMS were the main objectives of

the newly designed questionnaire. As in the first interview round, the researcher wrote memos immediately after each interview.

1 19 months after the TMS introduction, please indicate the top factors still influencing positively or negatively your usage.

2 Are factors influencing your usage during the first months still valid? Which ones have now disappeared?

3 Explain why certain factors have disappeared.

4 Three usage phases were identified: adaptation, exploitation, and benefits realization. After 19 months, in which phase are you?

5 Can you give examples of your usage behaviour in each of these phases? 6 Please tell me what the TMS tool has brought to you (+/-)?

(e.g. regarding task productivity or job objective achievement). 7 Do you use now the TMS differently compared to the first months of

introduction (e.g. frequency, functionalities)? How? Why?

8 Have you seen an evolution of the benefits brought to you by the TMS? How? Why?

9 Do TMS data and functionalities help you improve the following tasks? 1. Customer visit planning

2. Access to product and customer information 3. Customer relationships

4. Customer analysis

5. Tracking of activities at customer site 6. Customer visit reports and follow-up

7. Customer and product information exchange with other company staff 8. Other administrative tasks? Please name.

Table 3. Semi-Structured Interview (Case 1, Second Round)

In summary, 21 interviews were conducted during those two rounds (Table 4). Interviews generally lasted from 30 to 90 minutes, and followed an informal protocol focused on eliciting information about the interviewee’s job, work processes, and changes to those processes, and what he/she particularly liked or disliked about the TMS (Strong and Volkoff, 2010). In addition to those formal interviews, the researcher engaged in casual conversation before and after interviews as well as during lunches in the company’s cafeteria. The researcher also held quarterly telephone conferences with the local project manager to track the evolution of the TMS initiative between the two interview rounds.

Interviewees Location April ‘08 June ‘08 Nov ‘09 Jan ‘10 Global PM Geneva X X Local PM Bucharest X X IT manager Bucharest X X

Trade marketer associate 1 Bucharest X X

Trade marketer associate 2 Bucharest X X

Trade marketer manager Bucharest X X

Support coordinator Bucharest X X

Operational planner Bucharest X X

Leisure channel associate 1 Bucharest X X

Leisure channel associate 2 Bucharest X

Merchandising manager Bucharest X

Trade segmentation manager Bucharest X

Total number of interviews - 1 9 10 1

Table 4. Interviewees (Case 1)

For the second and third case studies, the researcher tried to correct the weaknesses identified during the first case study. Firstly, the researcher spent more time comparing interviewees’ comments, behaviours and the resulting memos, with the intent to isolate the specific circumstances and facilitating conditions that could explain the different usage behaviours. Constant comparison is a key element in developing GT and the researcher felt that he could have focused more on this aspect during the initial case study. Secondly, the researcher held interviews more regularly, every four to eight weeks depending on staff availability. The increase in frequency made it easier for the researcher to follow the evolution of usage behaviours and to identify facilitating conditions and milestones. Because interviewees did not have to remember events that happened several months ago, they provided more accurate information. The researcher could gather almost ‘real-time’ data and did not have to rely on the memories of participants, as in the first case study. Respectively seven and four rounds of interviews were held during case studies two and three. Thirdly, the researcher better exploited some of the QSR NVIVO functionalities, especially when structuring collected longitudinal data. For example, the researcher coded each interview round separately by attaching a round-specific tag to each open code identified. He was then able to perform a detailed analysis of the evolution of the codes round by round. Fourthly, the researcher was granted full access to users, documents, and log data, as in the initial case study, but this time all user departments were represented. This was not the case in Romania, where the researcher interviewed only users based in Bucharest. Additionally, for both cases, the researcher was introduced to the

CRM initiative business sponsors who helped him better understand the business objectives of the CRM project. The researcher could not interview the business sponsor during the first case study, and felt that it was definitely a key weakness. The researcher unfortunately had only a few documents at his disposal during the third implementation. This lack of written documentation was not due to some kind of restricted access, but merely to the limited scope and complexity of the CRM project. The researcher was able to collect only a few documents: the user training presentation, the original business requirements document, the change request list, and post-implementation weekly sales activity reports.

The same set of interviewees was used throughout the second study. Three out of 16 participants left the company during the 13 month–research period, leaving a total of 13 participants at the end of the research (Table 5). Those remaining participants still represented the six user departments involved in the project. The researcher did not try to compensate for their departure by involving new stakeholders for two main reasons. Firstly, the sample of 13 was still representative of the departments and types of users (employees/managers). Secondly, as the main objective of this research was to track the evolution of usage by individuals since CRM deployment, adding new people in the middle of the project would not have added anything to this study.

Department Function

1 Marketing & Communications Marketing Manager

2 Marketing & Communications Marketing & Communications Director

3 (*) Fund Raising Fund Raising Director

4 Fund Raising Fund Raising Assistant

5 Executive Committee Director of Operations

6 IT Project Manager

7 IT Support Coordinator

8 Admissions & Recruitment Recruitment Manager

9 Admissions & Recruitment Admissions & Recruitment Director 10 Admissions & Recruitment Recruitment Officer

11 (*) Admissions & Recruitment Recruitment Officer

12 Medical Nurse

13 Medical Psychologist

14 (*) Research Research Assistant

15 Research Research Analyst

16 Internships Internship Officer

Table 5. Interviewees (Case 2)

The user population of the third case study originally included five sales representatives and the CRM administrator. Two sales representatives were based in Verbier, while the rest of the team was located in Geneva. One sales representative left after the second round of interview, leaving the researcher with five participants. The sales manager (who was also the CRM business sponsor) did not want to participate in the research project, claiming that she was not a user of the newly deployed CRM system.