SuccessRM – your blueprint for CRM success

How an effective Centre of Excellence mitigates the risks in your project

As a CIO, CTO, or IT Manager it can be very challenging to keep track of everything that is happening in your organisation, particularly when it comes to low-code and app creation. It seems as though new apps are coming out of the woodwork every day and you and your team are expected to be across all of them.

App development is very popular today and you feel as though there is a never-ending queue of people requesting access to the app-development tools.

Every other water-cooler conversation is about another idea for an app and there is a constant list of apps awaiting for approval.

You sometimes think that a job cleaning the Aegean stables would be easier!

Enjoy the rest of this article here https://www.opsis.com.au/resources/blog/how-effective-centre-of-excellence-mitigates-risks-microsoft-dynamics-365-power-platform-project

Recent Case Study

Recently I was approached by the COO of an organisation who went live with D365 late last year.?The COO was frustrated that six months later, only about 10% of their 200-ish users were actually using D365.?They have had a rocky journey to get to going live, and had to change their implementation partner part way through.

As you can probably imagine, this project is running very late on its deliverables and is over budget.

The issues that they have experienced include:

? Requirements interviews were not documented, so when the interviewer moved off the project there was nothing left

? Users lost faith in the solution because it was coming ‘for ever’, so when it arrived it failed to get traction

? The lack of use since go live means that the data in CRM is now out of date, and will need to be imported again

? Because the data has not been maintained, the reports developed for the management are pretty much useless

? The majority of the training provided to users was done via self-serve online training documents

How can you avoid the sort of frustration highlighted here?

1. Determine at the start of the project how each aspect will be done and ensure that you are happy with the approach. This should include being confident that if a key person leaves the project, it is relatively easy for someone else to pick up partially complete activities.
2. Establish a timeline for the project and confirm that this is realistic.
3. Communicate the timeline to your users and keep them abreast of the progress of the project.
4. Plan a go-live that is coordinated with training and that makes it undesirable (perhaps impossible) for users to continue to use legacy data sources
5. Design training that accurately reflects the users' working environment, including practical, hands-on scenarios that closely replicate their work.

More information

If something in this newsletter has piqued your interest, please do get in touch - via LinkedIn, or book a time for a brief chat here https://calendly.com/opsis/brief-chat .

Overview of SuccessRM

SuccessRM is a way of implementing CRM that increases your probability of success. SuccessRM weaves training and education throughout the project which means that no-one is asked to make important decisions that are outside their understanding.

I developed SuccessRM because when I looked at the projects that fail to deliver as much success as was expected, there are many reasons cited for failure. However these myriad of reasons nearly always boil down to mistakes due to a lack of knowledge of:

• The business
• The technology
• The methodology to achieve success

I see design decisions taken by people who do not know what the organisation does, day to day. I see technical decisions taken by people who have never seen the technology that is being implemented - other than perhaps a quick sales demo. I see the project ownership being completely outsourced to an external consultant - who may of course then leave the project.

SuccessRM sits beside both agile and big bang projects. As I discussed here https://www.opsis.com.au/resources/blog/how-to-decide-between-big-bang-waterfall-phased-approach-dynamics-365-project , each delivered 'chunk' of functionality should leave the users, as a minimum, no worse off than previously.?

The education included in a SuccessRM project helps everyone gain a greater appreciation of the project:

• the business understands the technology,
• the technical team, who are often external, understands the business
• everybody understands how to achieve the change in the organisation that is essential to achieve success in the project.

The education is a mixture of formal training, workshops and mentoring.

Although this education does take time, not needing the rework that it avoids usually pays for it several times over.

SuccessRM also recommends establishing a centre of excellence within the organisation.

When I worked in India, a colleague told me that CRM projects could only be successful on the third attempt. The first two iterations were needed to learn how to achieve success. Although this was 20 years ago, I have seen several organisations in Australia go through two or more failed projects - at huge personal and financial cost - before reaching success. Following a SuccessRM approach will avoid the first two failure / learning projects and deliver success from the outset.

If you would like to discuss how SuccessRM will help you, please book a time for a brief chat here https://calendly.com/opsis/brief-chat