Pay Attention to the Business when Doing Projects
October 1st, 2006 by HalSoftware implementation projects in the business setting can confront a company's business processes. When the project team fails to examine the current business processes the project often fails. Writing in CRM Magazine, Barton Goldenberg warns readers, Business Processes Must Precede Technology. (You'll find the same advice reading The Toyota Way, by Jeffrey Liker.) He urges teams to avoid just adopting the business processes inferred by the software. He goes on to say, Unfortunately, too many organizations depend on CRM software vendors to supply needed business processes.
As an alternative, Goldenberg recommends a two-step approach to getting CRM efforts off to a good start:
Pay close attention to the specific business situation for your project.
- Document the key as-is business processes (e.g., using swim-lane techniques) and make sure to note where they fall short.
- Review best-practice business processes…that help address these shortfalls and then agree to move as-is business processes to to-be business processes
The author could have been writing about any software implementation project. Good business process can be more important than good software to support it. When there's a mismatch of the business process with the promises to the customers there'll be real trouble.
Why do I write about CRM implementation projects? Because so many companies are implementing CRM software and so many implementations go bad. We can learn something about what makes any project successful by looking at projects failures. Goldenberg's general point is to pay close attention to the specific business situation for your project. That is a lesson that applies to all projects.
Related Posts
- Distraction, another Form of the Two Great Wastes™, Leads to Project Failure There's no independent study I'm quoting today. No, I'm just sharing what I've been observing. In yesterday's post o...
- Green Pays Off in Green for Adobe Most of us know Adobe for its Acrobat PDF software. Did you know that the firm is green? Business 2.0 calls them The...
- Breakdown-Tolerance: Is it Time to Act? I left off looking at the question, "Do we make commitments at the last responsible moment or at the most responsible mo...
- What’s Driving Toyota? While Toyota is in 3rd place in the US behind Ford and GM, it ranks 2nd in sales worldwide and 1st when it comes to pr...
- Seth Spreads the Idea of Mastery Vince Lombardi was wrong when he said, "Winners never quit and quitters never win." Do I have your attention? That's...
