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03.08.10 Tips For Building A Successful CRM Project  By Jim Berkowitz Here are several excerpts from a post by Richard Boardman, CRM Project Plans - Where Does It All Go Wrong?: For those of you currently planning a CRM project, I thought it might be helpful to identify some of the areas where things tend to go 'off-piste', but before I do perhaps it's a good idea to suggest why we might care in the first place. If the CRM project team come under time pressure, either through underestimating the time-line or through unforeseeable disruption, the, not unnatural response, is to try and speed things up. Unfortunately, often with limited things that can be sped up, this leads to cutting corners in some form or another. Commonly this manifests itself in dumbing down the requirements, reduced testing, and rushed training, which in turn invariably ends with user adoption issues which may ultimately prove insurmountable. Therefore understanding which bits of the implementation process are prone to delay is a key way of effectively managing time-line expectations. So the following are my top six areas where people tend to get caught out... • Contract negotiation • System design • Any key sign off point • Data-load • User acceptance testing • User adoption
Then of course there's the less foreseeable. In a recent project, pretty much the whole of the vendor project team were made redundant, which was more than mildly disruptive. These situations are not easy to cater for, however making reasonable allowance for the standard phases of an implementation is key to staying away from potentially perilous route of trying to deliver on a project plan that was never achievable in the first place. Check out the complete source article for more detail on each of the above six areas where projects run into problems. Comments About the Author: Jim Berkowitz is a seasoned executive with more than 30 years of professional services and project management experience related to Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Financial Management (Accounting & ERP) software solutions for small, mid-sized and Fortune 500 companies. As a Sales Force Automation and CRM Consultant, Jim has assisted more then 100 companies with the design and implementation of custom CRM solutions. Mr. Berkowitz is the founder and President of CRM Mastery, Inc.; a company dedicated to serving small and mid-sized enterprises (SMEs) by offering affordable tools and guidance to help them plan for and succeed with their CRM initiatives. |
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