Crm project enabling agility beyond challenges
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The document discusses tensions that often arise in CRM projects between rigidly managing scope and requirements versus enabling innovation. While project managers need to control requirements to deliver on time and budget, CRM projects are learning experiences that often lead to new ideas from stakeholders. The author argues that true agility is needed to respond to innovation as it emerges rather than suppressing new ideas. Following agile principles like continuous delivery, welcoming changing requirements, and keeping phases short can help balance scope management with fostering innovation in CRM projects.
Crm project enabling agility beyond challenges
- 1. CRM Project: Enabling Agility beyond Challenges Dears, I have often witnessed tension in CRM projects between scope management and innovation. Organizations start out thinking of CRM as a project with a budget, a deadline, and a set of high-level requirements. These requirements include the demands of the business heads who decided to pay for the project so they are generally not flexible. While there may be vague discussions of future phases to encompass a broader wish list, nobody gives that much thought. The focus is exclusively on the project at hand that will bring CRM to the organization. Upon kick-off, the project manager (or in some cases business analyst, IT manager, or CRM consultant) must flesh out the detailed requirements as quickly as possible and then prevent those requirements from changing. Project managers know that requirements churn poses the greatest risk to the schedule and budget. With deadlines and budget usually tight and the high-level scope aggressive, the only hope for project success is a determined effort to avoid requirements churn. The problem is that CRM projects are great learning experiences. As participants think through how they do their work, as they verbalize and visualize their processes, as they understand how their processes affect others across the organization, as they collaborate on how a new system could empower them to reach objectives, they start to rethink what they expected of CRM. People wonder whether they might just innovate. Oh, no. Sounds like requirements churn. No, let’s not go there. That is a later phase for which there is no budget and no timeframe. So just forget it. Let’s squash that innovation right now lest expectations get out of control. Project managers must meet expectations and so they must control expectations. Since I’m a PMI certified project management professional (PMP), I do know the PMI answer to this dilemma. It is scope management with a documented process for handling change requests. The problem here is twofold. First, few organizations put such change control boards in place. Second, such a rigid process is unlikely to foster innovation. Just tell somebody with a new idea that they must fill out a change request form and submit it to a committee of superiors and you can be sure they will not have any new idea. Because CRM projects lead to learning and new ideas, agility is essential to respond to innovation as it happens rather than squash new ideas as a threat to the project schedule. To consider what agile means, let’s take a look at a few of the guiding principles from the Agile Manifesto.
- 2. · Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software. · Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer's competitive advantage. · Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale. · Simplicity--the art of maximizing the amount of work not done--is essential. · The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams. Applied to CRM, I would translate these principles into the following bullet points. · Break from the notion that CRM is just one big project with a defined beginning and end. The challenge of satisfying customers and meeting market threats never ends so why restrict the opportunity for employees to innovate. · Launch CRM with an expansive vision rather than a rigid scope. The vision should include making the organization outwardly focused toward its customers and markets and promoting continuous improvements in processes that add value to customers. And the vision should tie in closely with the organization’s mission statement and strategy. Obviously, the CEO would be a great person to deliver that initial vision at a kick-off meeting. · Include the widest range of stakeholders in the kick-off meeting even if initial phases will not directly affect them. Collaboration across the organization is a great catalyst for innovation. · Keep each phase, especially the initial phases, short so that the team does not have to push off new ideas far into the future. Do not insist that the first phase include every high-level requirement requested by the executive stakeholders. Some of these requirements may be replaced as new ideas emerge. And once people start using a system, they will have a better understanding of their requirement priorities. · Follow proven project management practices within each phase to reliably implement new features on time and within budget.
- 3. · Encourage brainstorming and idea generation on an on-going basis. When new ideas emerge, create ad-hoc teams to pursue them even if the actual implementation is not in scope for the current phase. Do not just say “not now” and leave it at that. · Make sure initial phases focus on usability rather than maximizing features. If people hate using CRM, it is unlikely to become a platform for innovation. · Select a CRM platform that not only satisfies initial requirements but can adapt to meet evolving requirements. · If you hire consultants to start you on your way with CRM, make sure team members learn as much as possible from the consultants both about how to perform business analysis and how to customize the CRM platform. In that way, the journey of continuous innovation through can continue after the budget for consultants runs out. In other words, start out with a big vision but get there through small steps.