Customer Relationship Management (CRM)?

Question

I am about to start my own CRM project, but I want to know what are some common failures I would be encountering and strategy to eliminate these failures.

Answer 1

I have been managing CRM projects for large and small companies for over 10 years, and if you are planning on implementing a commercial or open source CRM package, then the top failure points I have found are as follows:

1. Customer Expectations - The projects that I was involved with which failed always came down to a breakdown between what the customer expected (internal customer (like your internal sales department) or external customer ( in the case where you are a contractor/consultant working for a business) and what was promised. "Over-Communicate" is the mantra that must be remembered to try and avoid failure due to expectations that are not in balance with the reality of a situation. This can include expectations regarding delivered functionality, project time-line, and hard costs.

2. Personnel - Make sure you have dedicated people, who are experts in the areas that you need them too be. I have seen many projects with key resources or even low-level resources that hold up an entire project simply because they took a bad approach or a short cut that came back later to unravel a project.

3. Project Management - Although it seems obvious, the style of your project manager and his or her team is a critical point on any project and can avoid numerous roads to failure if the right manager and team is chosen early on. My experience is that there is no "best" way to manage a project, and therefore no "best" project managers. It really comes down to a need for the project manager and the business sponsor/owner to be on the same page and have the same philosophy as to the approach that needs to be taken to implement the solution.

These are a few key failure points I have seen in my experience, but there are entire books written on the subject as well, but perhaps this is a good starting point