What Makes a Successful IT Project
Posted by Bill on July 27, 2010
A lot of people think a successful IT project is driven by technology. While technology is important and has to be capable of doing the job, its only one piece. A big part of any IT project is change management. Users are being asked to change how they do something. Two key factors to consider are how much of a change are users being asked to do and how much pain do they currently have with the existing processes. The less the change and the more pain felt with the current solution, the easier it is for an IT project to be successful.
A lot of CRM projects fail or have trouble because they are implemented into sales organizations where there is a fairly unstructured sales process that the sales people are happy with and is possibly even getting results. Management may select a CRM solution that is designed to drive a structured sales process and requires active use by the sales people. This would be a big change into an environment where the users are not feeling much pain with the current process. In this case, its not the software, but the changes being introduced into an environment that is comfortable with the existing processes. The change can be done, but it must be managed. Helping the users understand the reasons for doing (possibly to drive more sales and higher commisssions) and then minimizing he change. One way to do the latter is to introduce a project in Phases. More to come on Phases in a future blog.