CRM project planning…

I’ve spent the last few days putting together case studies based on some of our assignments from the last several months. One thing that struck me hard, was how much of our work has been around helping our clients budget for projects and work out what internal resources will be required to execute successfully.

The question most organisations want answered when contemplating a project is ‘how much is it going to cost?’. The traditional route to answering this has been to meet with vendors and solicit proposals. There are two big problems with this. One, vendors are well aware that they live in a competitive market, and they aren’t in the business of putting obstacles in the way of clients doing business with them. The net effect is that man day estimates of their involvement in the project tend to be on the low side.

The second, and much bigger issue, is that what vendors quote for, is generally a fraction of the overall project. Sure, they will customise their software, integrate it if you want, provide training etc, but there’s a huge amount of work involved in project delivery beyond what they will ordinarily provide.

A vendor proposal will typically exclude, though may not be explicit in saying so, areas such as process design, process documentation, data preparation, basic configuration such as mail-merge templates, security settings, pick-lists etc, administration, hand-holding, usage audits, ongoing training, plus of course the involvement of the internal project team itself. Any one of these areas can be significantly more extensive than the entire vendor involvement in the project.

The wash up is that many organisations embark on projects at times where they don’t have the internal resources in place to deliver successfully. The net effect is that the project, starved of the inputs it needs, fails to produce a decent return on investment.

OK I’m biased, but if you are contemplating a CRM project, I’d advise you to spend time carefully (and ideally independently verifying) that you really have a grip on the cost and resource requirements. As in air travel – it’s wise not to start a journey if you haven’t got the fuel to complete it.

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