CRM Project Plans – Where Does It All Go Wrong?

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…

1. Contract negotiation
2. System design
3. Any key sign off point
4. Data-load
5. User acceptance testing
6. 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.

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Tagged as: CRM Best Practices, Project Management