Concerned and impressed at the same time with Dynamics CRM 365

A story about business people taking Dynamics CRM 365 and making excellent use of it for their department while bypassing all internal processes and governance.

I recently found a situation where a business team had outgrown a spreadsheet for their account and contact management needs. The business team had gained access to a model office/demonstration Microsoft Dynamics CRM 365 instance and quickly started using that as their main solution to support their department.

One of the business users had figured out how to do minor configuration. They had loaded a few hundred contacts, added a few fields and created some dashboards. So within a few short days, for no money, the business had a basic system up and running.

The professional IT part of my brain said they were wrong to bypass their companies processes and procedures, they didn’t have any support, didn’t have approval for their data to be in the cloud and a number of other good reasons why this was bad.

However, I couldn’t help but be impressed by their drive and how much they had achieved with zero cost and in only a few weeks. They worked for a large and bureaucratic organisation, so if they’d followed the proper processes to get a system from IT they would probably have to wait at least six months.

I think there’s a danger CRM projects encourage unnecessary configuration and customisation by having upfront design and build phases. When asked about their requirements, most users struggle to move from the past — they normally list their requirements as what they have now, with a few extras.

A recent example was a delivery project where the business subject matter experts required developers to make many configuration changes to Dynamics for Customer Service over several sprints. Mostly this seemed to be so they could continue to work in the same way without changing their processes or business. I’m confident the business could have easily used out-of-the-box Dynamics Cases with a few minor tweaks.

An Ideal Microsoft Dynamics CRM 365 project would be starting small/single function (out of the box) and then receiving regular enhancements as releases every three weeks. Find an area of functionality that can be used out-of-the-box and put it live first. Then agree the priority order of backlog requirements with the product owner for adding features. I believe this is a better approach as opposed to having many months of design and build up-front before first release.

This will benefit the business by:

• Bringing features into production more quickly
• Early business benefits from package software
• Regular/quick turn-around functional releases
• Users gain confidence and interact more with development teams from quick/regular releases
• Often cheaper to change business process than software

The downsides might be:

• Some projects do need complex integration
• Some businesses are forced to have complex processes
• Some businesses can’t handle change this quickly, e.g. safety critical processes

As the customer has selected a ‘package’ CRM solution, they should be highly encouraged to use the ‘package’ as it comes. Package should be the first choice and only look to configuration or customisation where the business can prove benefit compared to the development, test, support and upgrade costs.

For each customer and project, you need to understand complexity required and ability to handle change. Then tailor your approach to suit.

I accept a very out-of-the-box, agile and rapid approach won’t always be possible, but it should be the starting position, rather than starting with the question ‘what do you want us to build?’ This should lead to package CRM projects that are cheaper, faster, more supportable and upgradable.

Picture by Luke Phillips