Challenges on your way to success

CRM initiatives can be difficult. They require change, often impacting processes and workflows that are at the heart of your staff's daily responsibilities. They force you to rethink how your organization operates to support its mission. They may require you to restructure external relationships even as you are rebuilding internal processes and tools. Externally, the way your constituents experience the interaction with your organization might change. Internally, business processes and supporting technological systems may need to change in order to break down departmental operations' silos, increase efficiencies, and enable more effective targeting, improved responsiveness, and new initiatives. The success of the CRM project often depends on changing the behavior and attitudes of individuals across the organization, and replacing, changing, and/or integrating many IT systems.

To realize success, as you manage the organizational culture changes, you will bring change to the daily processes for a lot of staff at your organization. As a result, it is often very challenging to align the interests of the staff and organizational units with the organization's broader interest in seeking improved constituent relations, as promised by the CRM strategy. This is why it is important to get someone influential and important involved directly with the project. They must help staff see beyond their immediate scope of responsibility, and buy-in to the larger goals of the organization.

On the technical side, CRM projects for mid- and large-sized organizations typically involve replacing or integrating other systems. Configuring and customizing a new software system, migrating data into it, testing and deploying it, and training the staff members to use it, can be a challenge at the best of times. Doing it for multiple systems, and more users, multiplies the challenge. Since a CRM initiative generally involves integrating separate systems, you must be prepared to face the potential complexity of working with disparate data schemas requiring transformations and cleanup for interoperability, and keeping middleware in sync with changes in multiple independent software packages.

Any of these challenges can make it hard to achieve your project goals. Reasons why projects of this kind often fail:

• Lack of executive-level sponsorship resulting in improperly resolved turf wars.
• Too much focus on the IT side of things. IT is there to support your mission and processes. It is an instrument, not a goal in itself.
• Too little thought on how to deal with data that is used at all levels of the organization.
• Lack of buy-in, leading to a lack of use of the new CRM system and continued use of the old processes and systems it was meant to supplant.
• Lack of training and follow-up training causing staff anxiety and opposition.
• Customizing the new system to look like (a combination of) the old systems.
• Incomplete, low-quality, or invalid data.

This does not mean that there is no way you can successfully implement CiviCRM. Planning at the start helps. Building in room for adaptation of the plan, as we learn from each step as we go along, helps too.

Perfection is the enemy of the good

CRM systems and their functional components such as fundraising, ticket sales, communication, event registration, membership management, and case management are essential for the core operations of most non-profits. This makes a CRM implementation project a scary one. Planning is a good idea, but be careful of the perfectionist pitfall. You will not know everything in advance, and trying to create the perfect plan that ensures success will lead to overkill in planning and procedures. While planning is good, perfection may not be good, as perfection is often the enemy of good.

CRM implementations often risk erring on the side of what is known as the MIT approach. The MIT approach believes in, and attempts to design, construct, and deploy, the Right Thing right from the start. Its big-brain approach to problem solving leads to correctness, completeness, and consistency in the design. It values simplicity in the user interface over simplicity in the implementation design.

The other end of the spectrum is captured with aphorisms such as Less is More, Keep it Simple, Stupid (KISS), and Worse is Better. This alternate view willingly accepts deviations from correctness, completeness, and consistency in design, in favor of general simplicity, or simplicity of implementation over simplicity of user interface. The reason that such counter-intuitive approaches to developing solutions have become respected and popular is the problems and failures that can result from trying to do it all perfectly from the start.

Neither end of the spectrum is healthier. Handcuffing the project to an unattainable standard of perfection, or over-simplifying in order to artificially reduce complexity, will both lead to project failure? Value and success is generally found somewhere in the middle.

It will be the responsibility of the project team to set the tone, determine priorities, and plan the implementation and development process. One rule that may help achieve balance and move the project forward is Release early, release often. This is commonly embraced in the open source community, where collaboration is essential to success. This motto does the following:

• Captures the intent of catching errors earlier
• Allows users to realize value from the system sooner
• Allows users to better imagine and articulate what the software should do through ongoing use and interaction with a working system early in the process
• Creates a healthy cyclical process where end users are providing rapid feedback into the development or configuration process, where those ideas are considered, implemented, and released

There is no perfect antidote to the two extremes of the MIT approach and the Less is More approach—only an awareness of the tendency for projects (and stakeholders) to lean in one of the two directions—and the realization the both extremes should be avoided.