You know where you want to end up but how about where to even start with your CRM implementation? Well, it’s really all about your end goals and working backwards.
You generally have 2 ways of looking at launching a CRM:
- A “big bang” approach
- Establishing a Minimally Viable Product (MVP) milestone
Take a guess which one is more risky and causes you to pull more of your hair out? #1.
Why is that?
You’re injecting a whole host more variables. The thing is there’s always “known unknowns” when you do IT projects. Translate: you’ll only start discovering some important needs once you dig deeper into the project.
Here’s a prime situation where this occurs: once a consultant or you are working thru the data sets and the ETL process that reveals underlying priorities of your organization that were left unstated in the project scope.
Unknowns = Scary, right? You got it; that’s why I’m a big fan of de-risking your CRM implementation as much as humanly possible.
Think that internal wiki is critical? A member portal? Various API integrations or advanced workflow automation? Other reports that seem handy? They well could be at some point but the thing is your priorities today are but a snapshot in time.
Like all things in life, they change. Only when you “travel down the road” will understand what next highest value decision(s) to make next. So why bother spending precious dollars on a consultant and your time working on aspect(s) that may turn out to be not that important in the future? Caveat: there is a difference between aware of potential future developments and doing it all in one go.
Imagine a tree. All your decisions are based off of one large branch aka a feature proving valuable. Well, if it turns out this isn’t vital after all you’ve built a tremendous dependency on the one large branch and all the subsequent work is for nought, or will have to be significantly re-envisioned.
So how far out do you look? Not immediately in front of you or far off into the distant unknown. You want to look off at what’s on the horizon. What’s around the bend.
Once you have this visual outlook, one of the best ways to go about this is defining the absolute must have’s via a MoSCoW framework. It’s broken down into:
- Must-Have = Mission-critical
- Should-Have = Important but not crucial
- Could-Have = Nice to have
- Won’t Have = Out of Scope
Or take Warren Buffet’s 25/5.
- Make a list of top 25 priorities
- Rank them by importance
- Do the top 5
- Ignore the rest
All of this is trying to get you to take a brutal approach to what matters. The goal here is not to appease everyone idea, but push back and ask “why”? How does that drive value to achieve our mission? If you didn’t do it, are there less costly, viable alternatives?
Every CRM expert worth their salt knows that you better make the Development Director job significantly better in their new digital house (CRM). Making it easier to raise funds, automating tedious work that otherwise requires staff time they never had the human resources to prioritize, reaching critical donors at the right times, and gaining insights into opportunities.
That will have them singing the high-praises of the new system.
Sure, every staff member has needs but not at the risk of funding your organization. An automated report that could improve efficiency? Cool, chalk it up as a Should Have or Could Have. If it doesn’t drive any value or it’s pretty circumspect, it’s a “Won’t Have” and out of scope.
Ask yourself?
- What do you need to track about your constituents and how does that help you build a stronger relationship with them?
- Why do people come to your website?
- What do your users absolutely must be able to do on Day 1?
It’s a lot like a fabulous productivity book I recently read, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. You need to embrace the finitude of life. You need focus.
And if you’re like me, you’ll get the satisfaction knowing you just eliminated a lot of the noise that is inevitable when launching a new project.
And the thing is, not only does your project become more valuable it is also more affordable. On top of this, you de-risk your project by defining a tight scope to ensure your must have requirements are met. Trying to do a “big bang” aka “throw the kitchen sink at it” and something actually important will assuredly be dropped. And cost-overruns are all but guaranteed.
The harsh realization is when that sinking feeling starts to set in when all that time you spent planning, developing and building those new features doubly hurts because not only was it a poor use of time but it jeopardized the critical features; ones that makes alarms go off when your system goes live.
Here’s the deal:
Finding simplicity is hard, adding more wish list fancy features is amazingly easy. It’s the boiling down to the measurable outcomes and the CRM requirements that will get you there.
Now you have a starting line milestone (“go-live”). Or as I like to say, you can get to “Racing towards Your MVP”.