Year: 2005

As I mentioned in Monday’s post, I want to walk you through a CRM project to give some feel for what we do, and why we do it – and, because it is a real project, some feedback on how things actually played out. By way of background, this project Continue Reading

Keep It Simple Stupid….is always something I’ve tried to do (though the extent to which I’ve succeeded or not may be rather more moot). One of the goals for undertaking this blog was to communicate ideas, thoughts, and concepts about the CRM industry in a way that those from outside Continue Reading

There was an interesting article in the 5th December edition of BusinessWeek entitled ‘Shaking up Oxford’. It detailed the major challenges faced by John Hood, the new vice chancellor, in shaking up Oxford University to improve its standing in the global league of top universities. Echoing the entry I made Continue Reading

I met with a client a couple of weeks ago. Four years previously they had invested a decent six figure sum in an implementation of CRM technology. As time passed the system steadily fell into disuse, and the company wanted to review the best way forward. The software they had Continue Reading

Interesting conversation last week. One of our clients had recently lost a couple of key sales staff. Since they don’t have a big sales team, this represented a reasonable proportion of their sales capacity, and had the potential to be highly disruptive in the countdown to their year end. When Continue Reading

Reading through a book called ‘Peopleware – Productive Projects and Teams’ by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister I came across the following quote: ‘If you find yourself concentrating on the technology rather than the sociology, you’re like the vaudeville character who loses his keys on a dark street and looks Continue Reading

One of the things that has struck me over the years is how few organisations spend any great time defining and documenting their requirements for a CRM system before plunging into the frenzy of vendor selection. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the same organisations have struggled to realise Continue Reading

The following paragraph in Joel Spolsky’s recent post caught my eye: ‘Custom development is that murky world where a customer tells you what to build, and you say, “are you sure?” and they say yes, and you make an absolutely beautiful spec, and say, “is this what you want?” and Continue Reading

There are plenty of points in a CRM project where things can go astray, but one of the key ones is the design phase. To give this some context, let’s quickly cover what happens in a project leading up to the design phase. At the start of the project we Continue Reading

Despite the fact that a lot of our engagements are focussed on our CRM planning, requirements gathering and vendor selection services, we also get involved in a lot of project implementation work. Some people find this surprising – they figure once the CRM software vendor gets underway there’s little left Continue Reading