One of the most common pitfalls in any CRM implementation is poor change management.  While true of any software implementation, the impact of poor change management on CRM (or ERP for that matter) is high due to the pervasiveness and importance of CRM in the organization.

Earlier in my career, I learned the relative importance of change management the hard way.   I was doing an implementation for a company that had man branches.   After discussing the sales workflow process with representatives of three of the twelve branches, I erroneously concluded that all twelve branches were enough alike that a common workflow process could be implemented.   I drew up the spec, the customer signed off, and we went to development.

It was my practice at the time (and still is) to do demo checkpoints throughout the process to ensure that the development and configuration matches the customer expectations.  In this case representatives from the various branches sat in, including the branch manager of branch 5, who hadn’t been part of the initial discussions.  It turned out that branch five was an odd duck, and did things quite a bit differently than the other branches.

The discussions went back and forth, and it was determined that the system could not go live without branch 5’s participation.  Being young and green, and trying my best to please the customer, I gave in without really assessing and communicating the change’s impact.  This led the customer to believe that changes could easily be made ad-hoc, and as the product matured, the customer demanded more and more changes.  The solution ended up being delivered a year late and cost my company a lot of money.  This also led to user frustration and slow adoption of the CRM solution.

If I had stressed the impact initially, and tried to reign in the laundry list of change requests, I may have delivered a better, more coherent product far sooner and gotten much quicker user buy-in.  The other changes that kept popping up could easily have been added in later phases.  Instead, the project dragged on and became a joke among the employees.  Better, more realistic change management could have prevented the problems associated with this deployment.  The original branch 5 issue may have indeed been a necessary change, but I should have managed it better and reset customer expectations.  It may have caused short-term tension, but would have yeilded far better long-term results.

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2. Don’t Fall Into The “They Do It The Same Way” Trap
3. The Danger of Over-Engineering CRM for Small Business
4. Certified Organic Opportunity Management