Charles Darwin (1809 – 1882)
5. Build “Eco-system” for Adoption Management. Most CRM initiatives are launched to change way of doing business in organization – if they don’t, the economics of such an initiative should be questioned. However concerns about adoption challenges often shift the focus to functions and features from processes and economics.
CRM Enterprise software initiatives are rightly considered to be the most challenging Enterprise Software undertaking by many people in business, yet many companies dip their proverbial ‘toes” into this dangerous “water”. The attraction is, that when these initiatives do succeed, the return on investment is very fast and spectacular. It is interesting to understand what the critical reasons for such volatility are. I will explore them in this post, based on my own experience as well as what I have learned from various discussions with other practitioners.
1. Clear definition of objectives. The objectives are often articulated in terms which are not specific or measurable – “Improve Customer satisfaction”, “Obtain 360 degree Customer visibility”, “Increase time available for Sales calls”, “Improve Sales efficiency by 13%” – are quite common and absolutely useless if not harmful.
First and foremost, we have to manage better communication….Project failure and success seem to depend on saying, “Are you able to accurately articulate and collect what the requirements are?” and “Are you able to express the right estimates?”…. Too many times, the collection process is weak, because the customer is not easily able to articulate [his needs] in language the people [on the project] understand. [S]oftware estimation is not a trivial exercise; it is still an art rather than a science.
JP Rangaswami is the Managing Director of Service Design at BT Design
There is either no measurable target or agreement on base line and measuring methodology. The agreement is the crucial word in this sentence because we deal with an open economic system which can be influenced by multiple market factors outside of the sphere and control of this initiative. So it is difficult to come up with clear metrics which would allow for measurement, i.e. accountability, and people are not often motivated to do difficult things without effective leadership. The result is a list of features and functions which are collected without asking a fundamental question – How this feature, function or process would affect the GOAL?
2. Effective leadership. The leadership is very often outsourced or delegated to IT after initial, very loud announcements:
In American culture, we tend to equate leadership with yapping. There is no correlation. Lead Well and Prosper, by Nick McCormick.
I would like to thank Michael Krigsman for posting these and some other excellent references and analysis in his ZDNet blog.
That is why effective leadership is critical – Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.
Peter Drucker
It is much easier to be a critic, so I will try to be constructive for a change, ranting can get very tiresome. From my Best Practices notebook I can suggest the following targets as examples:
“Reduce selling cycle by 5% first year, and 7.5% during subsequent 2 years without decrease of average deal size, normalized to our industry market condition”;
“decrease deal discount rates by 10% from the current (pre-initiative go live) levels, normalized to industry market condition”.
These do not reflect the whole CRM footprint, but I found the SFA part is more challenging, that is why I have included these examples, but I hope it is illustrative enough to extrapolate to Marketing, Support, etc.
Oh, I would love to use this new SFA system!
It is business leadership which needs to step up to the plate and articulate WHAT do they want to achieve, and WHY these are the most critical targets to aim for. It is also very important that achieving agreed targets does not become an IT challenge, but remains a business challenge thru training, adoption, and compliance management. The IT is an enabler, not a deliverer of economic results.
I will continue later with the rest of the W’s
I have six honest serving men,
They taught me all I know.
Their names are Who and What and When,
Why and Where and How.
- Rudyard Kipling
Every time I participate in initial discussions of proposed enterprise application with business process owners, the same phrase keeps popping – “We want this system to be flexible”. I used to ask for clarifications, and usually they would respond with extremely ambiguous definitions of flexibility. We usually place positive value on the term “flexible”, but let’s face it, it is very easy to produce very negative, unintended results when the systems allow relaxed approach to processes and practices. The root of the current financial crisis is bringing too much ambiguity into definition of credit worthiness. How meaningful would Sales Forecasting system be, if expected dates of sale be defined as “sometime next year”?
We all have experienced messages that are so ambiguous the actual meaning of the message is completely lost. Most people I know function a lot better when they operate with a set of clear and consistent instructions, but yet when faced with a requirement to communicate in a structured data, they demand “Comments” field.
I grew up in a family that practiced very strict “cause/effect” approach to reward and punishment. Since ADD was not invented at the time of my childhood, the only “medication” I got was a belt. It took me a few decades to learn how to appreciate a concept of Accountability, and since outright denial is rarely believed, the ambiguity of our communications may be the best method to avoid and deny accountability without “losing a face” – “That is not what I meant”.
So here is an inherent and potentially “deadly” conflict for those of us, who want the systems we implement to be used AND to bring positive ROI:
Humans resist communications unless certain amount of ambiguity is present (i.e. use of structured data), but Humans, Organizations and Systems do not operate effectively when input is ambiguous.
That is moderately interesting (I hope), but not particularly helpful, however 12 steps program assure that acknowledgment of our problems is the first step to resolution. I can see two potential approaches to be taken, and I promise neither one involves changing human addiction to ambiguity.
The first approach is to take very patient and academic approach to dissection of desire for “flexible” system with the goal of listing every element which requires “flexibility” in business process owners opinion. Then each and every element listed has to be looked at from the perspective of the end result the application suppose to yield.
A few years ago I was involved in implementation of SFA application to a global sales force to accommodate, foster and support team selling regardless of geography. The software vendor was pestered with requirements to support multiple language sets within single data base instance with the intensity that brought tears to their eyes. The fights went on for weeks until it occurred to us that team members communicating within the system in their own languages could not possibly produce any value for each other since their content contribution could not be understood by each other. Remember Babel Tower? We almost built one. So going with the single language was not very popular to the proponents of “flexibility” and local operations managers denounced the decision until they realized an upside, and we found the way to accept their requirement to work with native language characters in contact records, which were mirrored in multiple instances of the Contact database. The solution was reluctantly adopted at first, but within a year a target of this implementation, increased average sale amount by extending the sales team efforts across geographies, was successfully realized.
The second approach is to use technology for converting “comments”, emails, wiki’s, and other free format content into structured data. The evolution of Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning technologies seem to approach the stage of commercialization and there are a number of companies which sell various tools that have a promise. Since it takes some serious skills to maintain clear vision in heavy “vaporware” conditions, I would suggest to limit experimentations only to very focused projects, severely limited in scope.
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