So now, you think that your organization will better accomplish its mission with CiviCRM. This chapter will help you plan your implementation of CiviCRM, so that your CRM initiative has the best chance to enable greater organization success.
In this chapter, we will do the following:
- Identify potential barriers to success and learn how to overcome them
- Select an appropriate development methodology
- Build a balanced team
- Get started by measuring baseline metrics, creating a vision, and creating a plan
- Focus your CRM strategy first on your constituents and mission, and then on operational efficiency
- Review effective ways to gather requirements
- Identify specific types of requirements to be examined in each of the major areas of CiviCRM functionality
- Itemize elements of a good implementation plan
- Review how to calculate the total cost of ownership of CRM systems and their alternatives
- Plan for success
This chapter speaks to people who have the responsibility for initiating, scoping, and managing development and implementation for the CRM strategy. The initial sections of the chapter especially are management-oriented. The material on improving constituent relationships is often non-technical, and not specific to CiviCRM. We have written it so that it primarily addresses executives, directors, and managers at medium and large-sized organizations. The personnel in smaller organizations should also benefit, even though they may need to scale down the suggestions. For readers who are technical and/or do not have managerial or executive responsibilities, this section should provide a good context for your work, and may help you advise managers and executives who do not have experience with CRM strategy development and implementation.
The latter parts of the chapter focus on identifying your organization's requirements for CRM functionality in different areas such as communication, membership, fundraising, and events. These sections are intended to help with brainstorming techniques that could be a part of your organization's overall CRM strategy. Although executives and managers of these areas are responsible for deciding which techniques they will use, technical staff wanting to elicit requirements from them will find numerous suggested questions.
Of course, you might be a semi-technical person who's trying to solve the database problem at a small non-profit with a three-member staff. If this is sounds more like your situation, then the initial parts of this chapter may provide inspiration on where you would like to aim, while the latter parts will provide useful ideas and suggestions that will be more immediately and practically relevant as you plan your work.
If you already have CiviCRM or another CRM operating in-house without a CRM strategy, it's not too late to be more methodical in your approach. The steps below can be used to plan to re-invigorate and re-focus the use of CRM within your organization as much as to plan a first implementation.
Constituent Relationship Management initiatives can be difficult. At their best, they involve changing external relationships and internal processes and tools. Externally, the experiences that the constituents have of your organization need to change, so that they provide more value and fewer barriers to involvement. Internally, business processes and supporting technological systems 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 projects often depends on changing the behavior and attitudes of individuals across the organization, and replacing, changing, and/or integrating many IT systems used across the organization.
Succeeding with the management of organizational culture change may involve getting staff members to take on tasks and responsibilities that may not directly benefit them or the department managed by their supervisor, but only provide value to the organization by what it enables others in the organization to accomplish or avoid. As a result, it is more challenging to align the interests of the staff and organizational units with the organization's interest in improved constituent relations, as promised by the CRM strategy. This is why an Executive Sponsor, such as the Executive Director of a small or a medium-sized non-profit organization, is so important.
On the technical side, CRM projects for reasonably-sized organizations typically involve replacing or integrating many systems. Configuring and customizing a single new software system, migrating data to it, testing and deploying it, and training the staff members can be a challenge at the best of times. Doing it for multiple systems and more users multiplies the challenge. Since a CRM initiative involves integrating separate systems, the complexity of such endeavors must be faced, such as disparate data schemas requiring transformations 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 realized and addressed. The common causes for failure are as follows:
- 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 training 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, causing:
- The costs of the system to escalate
- The best practices incorporated in the base functionality to be overridden in some cases
- User forms to become overly complex
- 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, leading to:
- Cost overruns
- Poorly designed and built software
- Poor user experiences
- Incomplete or invalid data
However, this does not mean that project failure is inevitable or common. These clearly identifiable causes of failure can be overcome through effective project planning.
CRM systems and their functional components such as fundraising, ticket sales, communication with subscribers and other stakeholders, membership management, and case management are essential for the core operations of most non-profits. This can lead to a legitimate fear of project failure when changing them. However, this fear can easily create a perfectionist mentality, where the project team attempts to overcompensate by creating too much oversight, too much contingency planning, and too much 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, since perfection is often the enemy of the good.
CRM implementations risk erring on the side of what is known, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, as the MIT Approach. 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.
There is no perfect antidote to these two extremes. As a project manager it will be your responsibility to set the tone, determine priorities, and plan the implementation and development process. Although it is not a perspective on project management, one rule that will 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 capture 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