Why Projects Fail

"What do you mean fail?"

We highly recommend you take a look at this and other articles on the Web. There is a wealth of valuable information to help you increase the odds that your project is a winner.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM), one of the hottest strategies in business today, is the transformation of enterprises, large and small, regional and global, to become customer-centric, while growing revenues and profits.

With the high failure rate of ERP projects in the Middle East, it would be all too simple to expect that high rates of CRM adoption are unlikely. Samir Makarem, applications manager, Oracle disagrees with this assumption, pointing to the fact that the region was better prepared for e-business than many parts of the world. “There is not a business today, whether in the Middle East, Asia or the US, that is not interested in maintaining existing customers while attracting new ones, and this is one of the primary benefits of CRM,” he said.

An excellent article on why CRM systems don't deliver can be found on the CRM Community Web site. It is titled "Why CRM Projects Fail" and written by Jim Dickie. Dickie is a Partner with CSO Forum, a firm that specializes in benchmarking how companies are reinventing and how they sell to and service customers.

In his article Dickie lists and explains a sad litany of why CRM projects fail so often. He bases his article on six years of research reviewing more than 1,200 CRM initiatives. It's well worth reading. Here's a sample of Dickie's reasons presented in his article:

• Under-Commitment
  
• Lack of Senior Executive Attention
• Tactical Project Orientation
• Part-Time Attitude
• Champagne Dreams/Beer Budget
  
• Picking the Wrong Technology Partner(s)
• Getting Boxed into a Technology Corner
  
• Buying Technical vs. Sales Process Expertise
  
• Picking a Short-Term Player
  
• Expecting to Just Add Water
• Avoiding the Human Side of the Equation
• The Fear-of-Change Syndrome
• The Big Brother Syndrome

• The It's Easy Enough Syndrome
• Being Too Diplomatic
• Not Having Executive-Level Buy-in
• Accepting Less Than 100% User Buy-in
• Backing Off at the First Sign of Problem
• Assuming that Done is Done
• No Formal Training for New Employees
• Inadequate System Support
• No Planned Enhancements/Upgrade

Key Issues

How will organizations select the best-in-class suppliers required to execute a CRM strategy?

What are the CRM project phases, and how will organizations qualify project scope, enabling technologies and success factors?

Augment teams with resources from ESPs, SIs and software vendors to increase the chances of success.

Bottom Line

CRM projects require many different skill sets over a project's life cycle, in addition to the technical skills required to install and configure the software specific to an enterprise's business needs. Leading organizations have more successful implementations using a combined staffing model than using either the software vendor or third-party SI alone. Successful CRM strategies are measured by the ability of an enterprise to achieve its business benefits, enabled by an effective implementation of technology, not by which software vendor or ESP/SI "made the date" for implementation.

The advantages of using ESPs and SIs include their increasing specialization in both the business and technology aspects of implementation (they generally have dedicated CRM practices); their experience installing many packages, which results in the development of best practices and superior problem-solving abilities gained over multiple projects.

The general disadvantage of combined staffing is that there may be increased costs and a larger burden on the enterprise's project manager to lead a team made up of personnel from multiple organizations. However, the benefits of a combined team far outweigh the disadvantages.