“You are either working on your goals or someone else’s” David Sander

Not sure who said it first but with CRM Implementations it is Doubly True “If it is Measured it gets done”. In our earlier steps we set our Smart Goals, Business Objectives  & Strategy. Now we set them into and order of priorities. There are two dangers here, attempting to do too little or cramming in too much. Work often expands to fill the time allotted so having a good project manager is critical to success. Beware of chasing shiny objects. As Confucius once said “He who chases 2 rabbits gets none” now is the time to buckle down and determine where the gold is.

Some Teams use a chart like the one below and put Stickers or Post It notes on it to do team voting. It often pays to tackle a portion of the project with low risk a good level of reward. How you define Success – High Level of reward should derive from our work on Smart Goals measured in number preferably in dollars of ROI.

As British Field Marshal Slim once said to build confidence in his troops he would use a Sledge Hammer (Large Group of Allied Troops) against a Walnut (Much Smaller Group of Enemy Solders) this ensured success and build moral. Nothing succeeds like success. Often implementation teams will pick one department or team for a pilot implementation, often Tech Support, Customer Service or Inside sales. These office bound teams are much easier to support. Most importantly you will get feedback rapidly and be able to correct & improve your implementation quickly.

One area to keep in mind is dependencies. Some implementation activates need to happen before others even if they are not High ROI Generators. For example: Locating Data, Cleaning & Normalizing Data, Importing Data. Having a slew of Pretty Colorful Graphics Laden Dashboards & Reports with No Data is well pointless.

Some teams use a chart like the one below with Yellow Sticky Notes or Stick on Smileys to vote on priorities graphically. This is a style used in many Agile Organizations. It generates team buy in.

In an agile – scrum project management approach the Product Owner & Scrum Master will build a project backlog and generate user stories for the implantation team. With the Agile – Scrum approach the goal is to provide Usable Software every 2-week Sprint. Usable means they have something to demonstrate, not necessarily that a massive chunk of software is coded. Often a mock-up or partly functioning product is demonstrated to get input for the next sprint where a more complete product is presented. This allows for fast changes as new and better functionality surface. Rather than waiting months for functional software to be presented that may or may not meet the Product Owners Requirements or worse leave out better ideas the surfaced during development.

In a Water Fall style of project management a Project Manager will work with the team to lay out the whole project based on the Goals, Business Objectives and Strategy we defined in our earlier steps.

This process need not be overly complicated Salesforce provides a great sample (Below) for putting the Goal, Metric, and Priority on one concise page.

Prioritizing the value of your Initiatives is a balancing act. There is a temptation to shoot for the moon.  Salesforce recommends a Crawl, Walk, Run approach. Use a combination of answers to these questions.  What needs to be done first to get basic functionality, where can we get a good solid win and where can be build a solid foundation for the whole organization. To get an idea of your Priorities.

http://image.mail.salesforce.com/lib/fe941c72756404757c/m/2/GettingStartedWorkbook.pdf

https://help.salesforce.com/servlet/servlet.FileDownload?file=015300000034eqiAAA