In this article by Joseph Murray and Brian Shaughnessy, authors of the book Using CiviCRM, Second Edition, you will learn to plan your implementation of CiviCRM so that your project has the best chance to achieve greater organization success.

In this article, we will do the following:

Identify potential barriers to success and learn how to overcome them
Select an appropriate development methodology

(For more resources related to this topic, see here.)

Barriers to success

Constituent Relationship Management (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 you are managing your existing data, and decide what new data you want to begin collecting. They may require you to restructure external relationships, even as you rebuild internal processes and tools. Externally, the experience of your constituents, as they interact with your organization, may need to change so that they provide more value and fewer barriers to involvement. 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 attitude of individuals across the organization and replacing, changing, and/or integrating many IT systems used across the organization.

To realize success as you manage the potential culture changes, you may need to ask staff members to take on tasks and responsibilities that do not directly benefit them or the department managed by their supervisor, but provides value to the organization by what it enables others in the organization to accomplish. 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 an executive sponsor, such as the executive director is so important. 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.

Unfortunately, these challenges to the CRM implementation initiative may lead to a project failure if they are not identified and addressed. Common causes for failure may include:

Lack of executive-level sponsorship resulting in improperly resolved turf wars.
IT-led initiatives have a greater tendency to focus on cost efficiency. This focus will generally not result in better constituent relations that are oriented toward achieving the organization's mission. An IT approach, particularly where users and usability experts are not on the project team, may also lead to poor user adoption if the system is not adapted to their needs, or even if the users are poorly trained.
No customer data integration approach resulting in not overcoming the data silos problem, no consolidated view of constituents, poorer targeting, and an inability to realize enterprise-level benefits.
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 causing staff anxiety and opposition. This may cause non-use or misuse of the system, resulting in poor data handling and mix-ups in the way in which constituents are treated.
Not customizing enough to actually meet the requirements of the organization in the areas of:
- Data integration
- Business processes
- User experiences
Over-customizing, causes:
- The costs of the system to escalate, especially through future upgrades
- The best practices incorporated in the base functionality to be overridden in some cases
- The user forms to become overly complex
- The user experiences to become off-putting
No strategy for dealing with the technical challenges associated with developing, extending, and/or integrating the CRM software system, leads to:
- Cost overruns
- Poorly designed and built software
- Poor user experiences
- Incomplete or invalid data

This does not mean that project failure is inevitable or common. These clearly identifiable causes of failure can be overcome through effective project planning.

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 profit. Since they are so central to the daily operations of the organization, there is often legitimate fear of project failure when considering changes. This fear can easily create a perfectionist mentality, where the project team attempts to overcompensate by creating too much oversight, contingency planning, and project discovery time in an effort to avoid missing any potentially useful feature that could be integrated into the project. While planning is good, perfection may not be good, as perfection is often the enemy of the good.

CRM implementations often risk erring on the side of what is known as the MIT approach (tongue-in-cheek). 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 like "Less is More," "KISS" (Keep it simple, stupid), 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 are generally found somewhere in between.

As a project manager, it will be your responsibility 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:

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 process, and where those ideas are considered, implemented, and released on a regular basis

There is no perfect antidote to these two extremes—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.

Development methodologies

Whatever approach your organization decides to take for developing and implementing its CRM strategy, it's usually good to have an agreed upon process and methodology. Your processes define the steps to be taken as you implement the project. Your methodology defines the rules for the process, that is, the methods to be used throughout the course of the project. The spirit of this problem-solving approach can be seen in the Traditional Waterfall Development model and in the contrasting Iterative and Incremental Development model.

Projects naturally change and evolve over time. You may find that you embrace one of these methodologies for initial implementation and then migrate to a different method or mixed method for maintenance and future development work. By no means should you feel restricted by the definitions provided, but rather adjust the principles to meet your changing needs throughout the course of the project. That being said, it's important that your team understands the project rules at a given point in time so that the project management principles are respected.

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The conventional Waterfall Development methodology

The traditional Waterfall method of software development is sometimes thought of as "big design upfront." It employs a sequential approach to development, moving from needs analysis and requirements, to architectural and user experience, detailed design, implementation, integration, testing, deployment, and maintenance. The output of each step or phase flows downward, such as water, to the next step in the process, as illustrated by the arrows in the following figure:

planning-your-crm-implementation-img-0

The Waterfall model tends to be more formal, more planned, includes more documentation, and often has a stronger division of labor. This methodology benefits from having clear, linear, and progressive development steps in which each phase builds upon the previous one. However, it can suffer from inflexibility if used too rigidly. For example, if during the verification and quality assurance phase you realize a significant functionality gap resulting from incorrect (or changing) specification requirements, then it may be difficult to interject those new needs into the process. The "release early, release often" iterative principle mentioned earlier can help overcome that inflexibility. If the overall process is kept tight and the development window short, you can justify delaying the new functionality or corrective specifications for the next release. If you do not embrace the "release early, release often" principle—either because it is not supported by the project team or the scope of the project does not permit it—you should still anticipate the need for flexibility and build it into your methodology. The overriding principle is to define the rules of the game early, so your project team knows what options are available at each stage of development.

Iterative development methodology

Iterative development models depart from this structure by breaking the work up into chunks that can be developed and delivered separately. The Waterfall process is used in each phase or segment of the project, but the overall project structure is not necessarily held to the same rigid process. As one moves farther away from the Waterfall approach, there is a greater emphasis on evaluating incrementally delivered pieces of the solution and incorporating feedback on what has already been developed into the planning of future work, as illustrated in the loop in the following figure:

planning-your-crm-implementation-img-1

This methodology seeks to take what is good in the traditional Waterfall approach—structure, clearly defined linear steps, a strong development/quality assurance/roll out process—and improve it through shorter development cycles that are centered on smaller segments of the overall project. Perhaps, the biggest challenge in this model is the project management role, as it may result in many moving pieces that must be tightly coordinated in order to release the final working product. An iterative development method can also feel a little like a dog chasing its tail—you keep getting work done, but never feel like you're getting anywhere. It may be necessary to limit how many iterations take place before you pause the process, take a step back, and consider where you are in the project's bigger picture—before you set new goals and begin the cyclical process again.

Agile development methodology

Agile development methodologies are an effective derivative of the iterative development model that moves one step further away from the Waterfall model. They are characterized by requirements and solutions evolving together, requiring work teams to be drawn from all the relevant parts of the organization. They organize themselves to work in rapid 1 to 4 week iteration cycles. Agile centers on time-based release cycles, and in this way, it differs from the other methodologies discussed, which are oriented more toward functionality-based releases.

The following figure illustrates the implementation of an Agile methodology that highlights short daily Scrum status meetings, a product backlog containing features or user stories for each iteration, and a sprint backlog containing revisable and re-prioritizable work items for the team during the current iteration.

planning-your-crm-implementation-img-2

A deliberate effort is usually made in order to ensure that the sprint backlog is long enough to ensure that the lowest priority items will not be dealt with before the end of the iteration. Although they can be put onto the list of work items that may or may not be selected for the next iteration, the idea is that the client or the product owner should, at some point, decide that it's not worth investing more resources in the "nice to have, but not really necessary" items. But having those low-priority backlog items are equally as important for maximizing developer efficiency. If developers are able to work through the higher priority issues faster than originally expected, the backlog items give them a chance to chip away at the "nice to have" features while keeping within the time-based release cycle (and your budget constraints).

As one might expect, this methodology relies heavily on effective prioritization. Since software releases and development cycles adhere to rigid timeframes, only high-priority issues or features are actively addressed at a given point in time; the remaining incomplete issues falling lower on the list are subject to reassignment for the next cycle.

While an Agile development model may seem attractive (and rightly so), there are a few things to realize before embracing it:

The process of reviewing, prioritizing, and managing the issue list does take time and effort. Each cycle will require the team to evaluate the status of issues and reprioritize for the next release.
Central to the success of this model is a rigid allegiance to time-based releases and a ruthless determination to prevent feature creep. Yes – you will have releases that are delayed a week or see must-have features or bug fixes that enter the issue queue late in the process. However, the exceptions must not become the rule, or you lose your agility.

Summary

This article lists common barriers to the success of CRM initiatives that arise because of people issues or technical issues. These include problems getting systems and tools supporting disparate business functions to provide integrated functionality.

We advocate a pragmatic approach to implementing a CRM strategy for your organization. We encourage the adoption of a change in approach and associated processes and methodologies that works for your organization: wide ranges in the level of structure, formality, and planning all work in different organizations.