Zen and the Art of CRM Implementation - Part I

The Holistic CRM Implementation

“It’s the economy, stupid”
- James Carville

Substitute the word ‘business’ for the word ‘economy’ in the quote above and you will get an idea of how important it is to understand that CRM is the solution to a business problem, not a technical problem. As such, every CRM project should have, as its core, the following objectives:

·         Solving one or more specific business problems;

·         Generating a positive return on investment;

·         Encouraging user adoption of the resulting solution.

CRM projects are often the product of profound changes being made to the way that an enterprise intends to conduct some aspect of its business. A successful CRM implementation must focus not on the technology, but on the business problem that is being addressed, and on how technology can be used to efficiently enable the business changes that will successfully solve that problem. In order to accomplish this, the business implementation and the technical implementation need to be integrated and managed as a whole solution, as opposed to independent and unrelated efforts.

As the figure above illustrates, the holistic CRM implementation must address program management, change management, system customization, data migration and systems integration, QA and testing, infrastructure, training, and deployment and support. Each of these pieces of the solution represents at least one critical workstream that, depending upon the size of the enterprise and the scope of the project, requires individual planning and execution. Addressing each of these workstreams and integrating them into a whole is a key factor in delivering a successful project that accomplishes the three objectives of: solving the problem; generating a positive return on investment; and encouraging user adoption.

Note that the implementation workstreams in the figure above are high-level, broad categories of effort, and each slice of the implementation pie will, in all likelihood, be further deconstructed into smaller workstreams; again depending upon the scope of the effort. In future posts I will drill down on the individual workstreams and discuss each in more depth.