Apprentice Hoots: Searching for Solutions

As part of her Salesforce journey, Charlotte is encouraged (and more than capable) of being involved in the development of our customer projects. In this week’s Apprentice Hoots blog, Charlotte tells all about her most recent adventure searching for the right solution:

Searching for Solutions

Team Coacto have recently begun a development project for an excellent local charity centre, who require an effective CRM solution to help them manage multiple aspects across the organisation. So far, I’ve had the opportunity to be involved in each step of the project from the initial meeting to developing user stories and last week, we finally made a start on building the demo. 

Last week, I began creating the calendar functionality that is desperately needed as the organisation offers a variety of bookable rooms and activities for people with disabilities to take advantage of. Based on the user stories, it was determined that payments would need to be added to each event or entry. Initially I created public calendars however due to limitations on events and activities, payments were unable to be added as related lists. My solution for this was a lookup field to an opportunity based off of the event.

It was quickly established that this was not very user friendly due to information being replicated twice in two separate objects within the org. I needed to take a step back and look for yet another alternative. I then tried an alternative method of creating calendars from the opportunity with custom start and end times to display the information visually. By doing this, it enabled me to add bookings, payments and any other booking details.

This was a learning experience for me to recognise that I will not necessarily go down one path to source the right solutions, instead I learnt that sometimes you actually have to think outside the box and discover alternative solutions. This experience also really honed in on how the ‘Ohana’ is key to delivering for our customer too. We had to work as a team to devise the alternative approach and make sure it was put into action effectively.

We have since shown the customer the potential features that can be available on the calendar and so far they have been really impressed which has boosted my confidence massively!

Owl see you later…

Charlotte