This is a true story. The company name
has been changed.
CRM project
Acme Corporation, a company
specializing in implementation of business applications for small businesses,
decided to expand into implementing Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
systems.
Acme executives decided to implement
the CRM package for their own use before selling it to their clients. The
implementation of CRM at Acme would be followed by the development of a
marketing strategy for the CRM product.
The Acme employee setting up their new
CRM system took the vendor training, then spent three days getting the system set
up for Acme. The implementation included installation of the software,
migration of data from the old contact management system, and four hours of
training on system navigation to the first four users.
Review of the CRM system
Acme’s president engaged a marketing consultant
to develop Acme’s marketing strategy for the CRM product.
The consultant began by reviewing what
Acme had done on its own implementation of CRM. Her assessment was that the
technical implementation of the system was very good, including software
installation, database optimization and system performance. These had been
achieved despite some technical difficulties with the hardware.
However, the consultant also pointed
out that there had been no changes in business process to ensure the successful
use of the new system. In addition, the implementation had been done with no
clear understanding of the goals of the new system, the benefits that were
expected or any vision of what could be achieved by implementing CRM at Acme.
Acme’s president was very interested in
the consultant’s comments. He recognized immediately that she was right – Acme
had not thought about what they hoped to achieve by implementing the CRM
system, and had not considered business processes in their implementation.
In addition, the consultant talked to
the president about his role should have been as the project sponsor, and
pointed out how critical the sponsor was to the success of the project.
Implementing CRM again
Acme’s president asked the marketing consultant
to re-implement the CRM product at Acme before developing the marketing
strategy.
The president rolled back the CRM
implementation, and Acme resumed use of the old contact management system for
several more weeks. The president enlisted the support of another key executive
in pushing forward with the re-implementation rather than using the system the
way it had been implemented already.
The re-implementation started with a
series of design workshops. The president attended every workshop, in order to
highlight to Acme staff the importance of this project. By the time the fourth
design workshop was over, the other staff members understood and agreed with
the need for re-implementation of the CRM system.
The re-implementation took five weeks,
considerably longer than the original three-day implementation. This time, the
work included definition of the expected benefits of the system, as well as the
new business processes needed to provide good quality data, and to ensure usage
of the system to benefit Acme.
The consultant stayed an additional two
weeks to complete the marketing strategy.
The sponsor’s lessons
The president of Acme, as the project
sponsor, learned a number of lessons from this project. The first lesson was
the importance of defining the system’s goals and benefits to the organization.
Without these, the system has no purpose.
The sponsor also learned about the
critical importance of business process change when implementing a system.
Without processes to ensure the success of the system, it will never deliver
the expected benefits. For example, in the new CRM implementation, processes
were developed for gathering, validating, and using the data in the new system.
The consultant also taught the
president about the very important role of the project sponsor. The sponsor’s
support of the project in the organization was critical to its success. When
the president attended design sessions, enlisted the support of another
executive and, after go-live, used the reports produced by the system, he
showed how important he believed the system was to the company. These actions
carried more weight than his verbal statements to the staff.
The final lesson for the sponsor was
the value of having the right person for the job. The employee hired to do the
first implementation was a skilled technician, but with skills different from
those required to implement this particular system at this particular company. The
president recognized the importance of the marketing consultant’s ability to
guide the setting of system goals and benefits and lead the development of new
business processes.
Copyright
2015 Debbie Gallagher
