xRM Consultant

Big news for xRM Consultant this week. After over 4 years spent at Chorus I am leaving to focus my attention fully on our new business xRM Consultant (UK) Ltd. I offer the following services:

- Business Systems Analysis Services

How would you measure success in your CRM project?....For many of us that, contrary to what Mr Shakespeare would have us believe, is the question.

The answer? Well, in truth, this is no single right answer. Often each department, or even individual will have their own idea of what a successful CRM project look like for them.However, what fascinates me is that so many companies often embark on large scale CRM projects without taking the time to truly outline what will be viewed as success. The management team see a business issue, perhaps relating to cost or efficiency, and jump for a quick "fix". "Hey, everybody is using this CRM thingy....we should do that!". The only trouble is that partner's are enlisted, budgets agreed and scope documents signed off before anyone has actually asked "Why do we actually need this again?".

This probably sounds very much like an odd thing to say for a CRM Consultant who spends his life encouraging people to implement CRM. However, implementing it for the right reasons, with clear business objectives is essential. Only then can you truly define true success, see measurable improvements and significant ROI.

What does failure look like? Now that's a different story! Everybody has clear in mind what failure is (Going over budget, missing deadlines...) but that too is often very subjective and is often nothing to do with the objectives of the project. So, without getting any more philosophical, what can an organisation who is implementing a CRM solution do to ensure that their project is successful?

Take Your Time

I chaired a discussion with over 30 delegates at a UK Housing Association conference last week on implementing CRM. When asked what they wanted to get out of our session, one delegate commented "To get it right first time with our CRM deployment".....Good answer

The only way to achieve this is to take your time in the first stages of any project. Rather than coming out of the meeting where you have identified your issue, reaching for Google and searching for CRM companies, take the time to really think about what the issues you are facing are. Identify the issues clearly and the solutions become more defined. Then, document what you would like to achieve from deploying a CRM solution, even writing a list of 2-3 key bullets of what are must-haves for the project to be a success.

Reaching back for Google yet? Hold on! Take the time to think about the wider business. If you are going to invest the time money and effort into a CRM project, why not see what else you can achieve whilst doing it? Can you bring teams that are working in disparate systems together and enable information sharing? Can you drive efficiency in areas that perhaps you would not expect (i.e warehouse, accounts dept...). Doing all of this takes time, time you may not think you have. But take it from one who has seen CRM projects rushed through by managers desperate to resolve their issues, if you don't take your time, you will pay the price down the line.

The time spent at this stage will save days even weeks of time resolving issues during or even after go-live.

Establish A Project Team


Now you have a clear view of your requirements. Ready for Google now? Not yet! Armed with your requirements and project objectives, establish an internal project team. I cannot emphasis enough how important this is. A good, well balanced (we'll come to that in a moment) and engaged project team can literally be one of the biggest factors in the success or failure of a project.

But who should make up this team? Your first inclination may be to involve all the people who have been involved in your discussions so far, or people who agree with your view on things. This is not always the best selection criteria and really any project team should be balanced. Your project team should have people from all areas and levels of the business with varying experience. Fresh ideas can come from the most unlikely of places. At a high level any project team should have:

A strong, driven Project Lead - This individual will be the first to read the documentation cover to cover and the last person to leave the night before go-live. They will get to know the system and therefore your business process inside out. They need to have the skills to draw out of people what they need and the strength to say no when asked for things that could derail the project. Clearly, this person is the most important member of the team and wouldn't normally be a member of senior management (trust me, you wont have the time)

Hi All,

Recently our customers have been looking into additional ways to customize Dynamics CRM 2011 to support the processes of their teams. For certain customers, those who have exhausted all the options of "supported customization's", this requires some creative thinking.


Its interesting as this desire for more quirky changes to Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 is really a product of its own flexibility. CRM 4, while great, was fairly static when it came to processes. A lot of companies used it as a CRM solution in the more classic sense. Then came the big moon step forward that was CRM 2011. This gave organisations so much more flexibility in integrating systems and supporting processes. Trouble is, you give a customer a slice and they want the whole cake! For customers who have now been working with and adapting Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 for the last 2-3 years, the desire for configuring Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 to support the ever changing and unique processes of their business sometimes goes beyond what is possible under the heading of "supported customisations". The answer? Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 of course!!


In the meantime, when it comes to these sort of requests, we have to get creative! In line with this we had a customer recently who wanted us to remove the Save Record button on the duplicate detection window. The inbuilt duplicate detection, whilst it has its limitations, nicely gives you the opportunity to not save your newly entered record if a duplicate is found. However, you are also given the option to save the record even if a duplicate is found. This causes a problem when you have a large team of users who, to be frank, you don't trust to allow the to create duplicates. Thanks to a very helpful blog post from MS Dynamics CRM 2011 Tips we were able to disable the Save Record button fairly simply by taking the following steps:

1. Navigate to your CRM instance on your app server.
2. Navigate to \CRMWeb\Tools\DuplicateDetection\ViewDuplicates\
3. Edit this file in Visual Studio or Notepad.
4. Add this line to the ShowPage() javascript member or any member that is called by onLoad(): document.getElementById("btn_id_Ok").disabled="true";
5. Save your change.

This will disable the button. If you would like to get clever (like we did) you can add some further script to disable this button for users with a certain security role.

Nice little bit of code that can help with the usability of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 in certain scenarios.

Thanks

xRM Consultant