The New CRM System - Company PM Story

I was recently involved in the project of upgrading the CRM system of my company to a more “advanced, interactive, powerful, and user-friendly” one. The new system was launched recently, but already several months overdue and also way over budget. I think it is to a large extent a failed project even though we do have a new system running now.

As a team member, I have observed the following mistakes:
1. The CFO of the company was assigned to be the Project Manager who has no previous project management experience, no IT technical background, and no direct involvement in the sales and marketing group who will be the users of the CRM system.
2. The CFO then oversold to the CEO (who also has no IT background and will not be an active user of the system) the system he was going to purchase and implement. The CEO was mainly interested in the reporting functions of the new system and had high expectations of the effectiveness of the new system, therefore giving his full support to the project. The CFO, in order to gain the CEO’s support, painted a “wonderful picture” of the new system to the CEO, not realizing that many of the functionalities he described were not going to be included in the new system, at least not if a significant amount of extra cost was not incurred to have those functionalities added. Obviously the CFO got the “picture” from the sales people of the company that was trying to sell us the system.
3. The company that was selling the new system then assigned their consultants to start designing and customizing the system based on our needs, and afterwards also migrated the data from our old system to the new system. The consultants were working with the CFO and our IT Manager on the designing and customization phases, but no comprehensive consultations with the sales and marketing group or the CEO. Therefore user needs, expectations, and requirements were not fully understood by the consultants.
4. After a few months of work, the new system was then launched on a trail basis to a limited group of users for initial evaluation. It was at this moment that serious deficiencies were discovered that major functionalities that were originally expected were not included. There was an outcry from the trial users and the CEO demanded those functionalities to be included, only being told that a significant amount of extra cost had to be incurred for that. The CEO approved it and the project continued.
5. The re-launch of the new system was then delayed again and again and new extra costs were added periodically as more and more deficiencies were discovered and had to be resolved. Finally under the pressure of the CEO, the system was re-launched, but as described by the CFO: this was only Phase 1 and more work had to be done.
6. The system is now being used in the company, even though complaints are heard regularly about the user-unfriendliness, the lack of expected functionalities, the deficiencies, etc. It was also mentioned many times that the new system was actually worse than the old system. And as mentioned earlier, the project was far from complete and many more months and much more money have still to be put on this project to try to achieve what the system was supposed to do, if achievable at all.

It is very clear from this case that without using and implementing project management best practices, a project is almost doomed to fail.