4.05 Use Cases: The Tool to Better Choose and Deploy Your Software

In this sheet, we explore how usage cases are an excellent tool of software stress during your tool redesign, or initial integration of a software solution.

Table of contents

Integration and overhaul of software solutions are strategic steps for a cultural institution and its teams. Whether it's a CRM, ticketing software, emailing tool, or a platform like a CDP/DMP (see Data Marketing Platform, Customer Data Platform... how far to go in data management?), these crucial choices demand great care in selecting and evaluating software.

Previously, we explained how to conduct a needs assessment and organize deployment within your organization (see the guide "Managing a Software Deployment Project"). In the following section, we help you lead effective discussions with software vendors by assessing their features against your actual-not imagined or projected-needs: using use cases will enable you to do this.

A use case is a test, a practical scenario-based simulation of a tool grounded in a situation close to the real needs of a potential user. This methodology, originating from the field of systems engineering, allows testing how a software solution meets a specific functional requirement.  

Why work with use cases?

The strength of this methodology lies in its grounding in your specific business needs: rather than basing your choice on generic features or sales demonstrations, a use case approach allows you to concretely demonstrate how an IT system functions in a given situation determined by your own requirements.

  • Use cases are aligned with business needs: this ensures a reliable evaluation of the software's ability to meet the cultural institution's specific uses. For teams, it is also an opportunity to rigorously define the need and reach consensus on it.
  • The service evaluation is objectified: testing based on a real scenario helps limit the risk of errors or misunderstandings about the tool's functional scope and goes beyond commercial pitches. Indeed, feature lists can be open to interpretation and often remain vague regarding their scope or implementation modalities.
  • The equipment choice is enlightened and facilitated: the software provider, rather than merely explaining the system, can show how it meets the institution's needs as previously formulated in the use case.
  • Team adoption is facilitated: change management is eased by involving the concerned teams from the selection and design phase, ensuring a smoother transition and faster appropriation.  

How to Build Use Cases

We recommend building your use cases as follows:

Identify the user and their goal

Who will use the software and for which specific need?
This could be a box office manager to facilitate the management of discounted rates and attendance, a communications manager to automate the sending of personalized marketing campaigns, or the director of the venue wishing to access real-time attendance data.  

Describe the use case scenario

It is important to formalize the expected actions in the simplest, clearest, and most precise way by specifying the users, the objective pursued, the systems involved, describing the scenario, and defining evaluation criteria.

Example: Re-engaging occasional spectators to encourage their return

User: Marketing manager
Objective: Identify people who have attended only once in the last 6 months and send them a targeted follow-up.
Systems used: CRM, ticketing system, emailing tool

Use case scenario:

  1. The user exports from the CRM the list of spectators who bought a ticket only once in the last 6 months.
  2. They segment these spectators by age and type of show attended.
  3. They create an automated email campaign with a special offer to encourage a return.
  4. They track email open and conversion rates.

Evaluation criteria:

  • Does the tool allow easy extraction of the desired data?
  • Can personalized segments be created without technical knowledge?
  • Is the email automation intuitive?

This test assesses the CRM tool's ability to interface with the emailing tool and whether the entire system effectively supports the planned action.  

Identify performance indicators

Each use case should include performance indicators (KPIs) that will measure the effectiveness of the solution and help decide between different options.

For example, when choosing a CRM software, indicators might include:

  • Time required to obtain and extract a targeted list of spectators.
  • The software's ability to perform both "AND" and "OR" queries (i.e., to aggregate multiple different search criteria, either combining or adding results matching each criterion).

These metrics allow you to assess whether the solution truly fits the teams' needs.  

Test the use cases before choosing software

Once the use cases are defined, move to the concrete step of implementing each case to "stress test" the software and evaluate the solution.

This demonstration can be conducted by the software provider's team in your presence, or you can request temporary access so your teams can test it directly. In both cases, it's important to gather feedback from all participants after completing all use cases, to collectively assess the results and possibly compare the different solutions tested.

Pay special attention to:

  • Ease of adoption by the teams
  • Speed of performing essential tasks
  • Functional fit with the use cases
  • Quality of customer support and assistance

Of course, no software will cover 100% of your team's needs, especially not exactly as you initially envisioned technically.

This is exactly why use cases are valuable: they let you choose, among inevitably imperfect options, the one that best fits your priority professional needs, limitations included. It's also a reminder that the best software isn't the one with the most features, but the one that best serves your core workflows.

Once the software is selected, the use cases defined during testing will serve as the baseline for final acceptance and team training before deployment.  

To go further

Rubriques

Explorez le sujet en quatre grandes rubriques dédiées au spectacle vivant, depuis la compréhension des enjeux jusqu'au pilotage stratégique.

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