Managing CRM Projects
In this post, we'll outline an approach we commonly use for organizing resources to roll out a CRM platform.
First and foremost, a CRM platform project is like any other business project. You'll constantly be managing competing priorities of timeline, resources, and quality. With that in mind, if you're particularly interested in understanding how to manage projects, I would highly recommend Scott Berkun's book "Making Things Happen". We've consistently found Scott's insights and approach to be valuable in navigating projects.
That said, I think there are some keys to successfully managing CRM projects. These keys are based on my experience that a handful of things are true for almost all CRM platform projects. These underlying truths are:
1. Sales organizations change faster than every other department in an organization, and you must deploy and iterate as quickly as possible or your solution will be hopelessly outdated.
2. It is critical to have unambiguous success criteria for your first two releases.
3. Most users can only effectively communicate what they want through examples.
Given these guiding principles, here's what we do in our projects to take them into account -
1. No release cycle is longer than 8-9 weeks. If you let it go longer than 2 months, the business has changed and left you behind before anyone has even touched the application.
2. All projects must have a specific tangible outcome agreed to by the project team and sponsor. An example of this is "Our sales team will be able to go from first contact through creating a Purchase Order without ever logging into anything other than Salesforce.com.". A counter example that we would find unacceptable is "At the end of our first phase, our sales team will be more productive." The benefit of the former is that it's specific enough to orient the entire team towards what they need to be doing in order to achieve the goal, while that later leaves much room for interpretation both before the project starts and after it's finished.
3. All design sessions should include prototypes where users can see and touch the proposed configuration.
The result is that we believe most successful CRM platform projects are structured similar to the sketch below -
In our next post, we'll dig into the key components of a CRM platform that the designers and business team will have to take into consideration as they are setting goals and exploring alternate approaches.