Rather too candid?

The 11th of June edition of the Economist carried an article entitled ‘Project management – Overdue and over budget, over and over again’ which bemoaned the tendency for projects to overrun in terms of cost and delivery date. The article cited research by the Standish Group suggesting that in 2004 IT projects averaged out at 56% over budget, and took 84% more time that originally scheduled.

The article went on to identify one solution, currently put into practice by Siemens, of integrating project managers into the sales process. It seemed an interesting approach, and one that I’ve no doubt would bring additional value to both vendor and customer. By involving the implementation team in the sale, I suspect there’s likely to be greater realism, and more attention to detail, than when the sales team are left to their own devices. The proposed solution I guess would be more expensive, but more accurate. The vendor would likely find the project substantially more profitable, and the customer enjoys a smoother implementation with less nasty surprises and unforeseen overruns.

Trouble is of course, this sort of win-win may prove rather elusive, when not everyone plays by the same rules. There’s a fine line between realism and losing the deal. There are still plenty of suppliers who are happy to low-ball a bid, and once you are locked in, play catch up. It’s going to be interesting to see if vendors adopt this approach, and whether customers end up rewarding their candour.

A stitch in time...

We have a couple of clients going live with systems at the moment, and we’ve been spending a lot of time working on an area that is frequently overlooked - defining the way the system will be used, and training and hold-holding the users so that these processes are quickly adopted.

I can’t readily explain why so little time is generally spent on this area. I suspect those purchasing CRM systems don’t realise that this is important, because they are unlikely to have implemented many CRM systems before. The software vendors, I suspect realise it is important, but need to draw a line somewhere. So they are in the main happy to sell, install, and customise software – but are wary of getting involved in the fuzzy area of process definition. It’s difficult to do, it’s difficult to quote, and if you were to introduce it as a line item in the proposal it would break a lot of budgets.

But the net effect of not doing it, is that two years down the line someone suddenly realises that the CRM system isn’t doing much for the business. In the absence of clearly defined, communicated, and managed processes, people having used the system as they see fit, the data is scrambled, and desirable outputs such as reports are meaningless. If you want the best out of a CRM system, then getting processes defined up front is crucial – it can be a very hard situation to remedy if you don’t.

Truncating the Fuzzy Front End

The bank holiday weekend gave me opportunity to read Steve McConnell’s book ‘Rapid Development’. One area that caught my attention was the phase of a development project which he describes as the Fuzzy Front End. In essence, if you consider the life of a project as extending from a glimmer in someone’s eye right through to live, the Fuzzy Front End is the part from the glimmer to the official commencement of the project itself. The point Steve makes, is that this part of the project can take a significant amount of time primarily because of a lack of perceived urgency, or assigned responsibility.

Steve’s observations resonate with what we see on a day to day basis with CRM deployments. Most spend the vast majority of their life meandering through the pre-commitment phases, but are suddenly plunged into a sprint for the line when the project gets sanctioned. While there are plenty of pitfalls and precautions to consider in order to keep a project on schedule and on budget once the implementation gets underway, the simplest way to reduce the time to deployment is to cut back the Fuzzy Front End. Reductions in time to deployment can in turn result in an accelerated return on investment and significant competitive advantage.

Though we might not have described it this way prior to reading Steve’s book, several of our service offerings are built around truncating the Fuzzy Front End. In particular our CRM planning services, where we move a customer swiftly through the preparatory stages of business case development, budgeting and identifying appropriate technologies and vendors, can add momentum and focus to a project. For many of our clients, particularly those up against larger and less agile competitors, speed is a key weapon.