Are you initiating a new project to implement MS Dynamics CRM? Well, usually, businesses engage an experienced Microsoft partner to assist with the implementation, and a budget is estimated at the start of the project considering the factors that are known. The budget estimates at the start don’t truly reflect the actual effort estimates required to implement a complex CRM successfully.
It is common that the implementation partners to base their estimates on time and materials; this creates a significant risk as the project bears the cost of any inaccurate estimates or “scope creep.”
Implementation begins, and, often, at the early stages of the project, the project starts discovering things that are not stipulated in the estimate. Usually, the only choice is to increase the budget to cover the additional requirements.
In many implementation projects, businesses do not have the internal resources engaged at the start of the project and don’t estimate the associated costs, either. When they get involved (usually at the end of the implementation), the MS implementation-partner role is typically turned into a reactive support role. The most common support models offered by implementation partners are hourly time and materials, which leads to additional costs without a clear end in sight. Not to mention that the cost of business resources are mostly unaccounted for at the start.
During the design and planning for the CRM implementation, it is impossible to capture all the required configuration/customisations that are necessary to achieve a successful delivery. Most often, many items are discovered during functional testing, training or user acceptance testing or after go-live. The biggest problem is that, at this point, there is no budget left to enhance the solution further. This can easily be handled better by engaging the right business team member at the start of the project on a test team and reviewing the requirements before the design phase.
Even if the project does have a dedicated CRM champion from the business operations team, as part of project, they usually cannot test the complete solution. There are many layers of technology to a CRM solution, and it is difficult for a few resources to possess all the necessary knowledge and skill sets to test and support the design of the entire solution.
Training and test environment costs and environment management lead/release manager costs are usually not appropriately estimated. A successful project has a dedicated environment and release managers in the project and has dedicated and fully maintained various environments as required by project teams.
At the end of the project, there may not be enough funding left to keep going for the CRM project, and company or project sponsors are reluctant to support it further as they do not see the expected value.
Other things that are not planned are ongoing user adoption monitoring/management, continuous solution road mapping, management and executive engagement.
Our experience helps businesses achieve success. We have developed a testing service that helps you mitigate the failure points, reduce risk and help ensure the successful implementation of Microsoft Dynamics CRM/365.
We work closely with the identified key CRM administrators/ champions and business stakeholders on the project and become their team for no surprises on day one.
Are you starting a new CRM implementation, that is the right moment to reach out to us. If you are already in CRM implementation and now facing challenges we can help. Just drop us a message at info@elevateit.co.nz for a quick chat of coffee.
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