CRM - 10 Critical Factors

Design by Democracy or Dictatorship?

Somebody in your organisation, maybe yourself, will be tasked with choosing and implementing your new CRM system. Should you solicit the views of everybody in each department, or should you simply impose a system because you know best?

Both approaches have their drawbacks. In the former “design by committee”, the risk is that in order to please everybody the resulting design will incorporate every feature ever invented, and then some more. This will result in a complex system that will be expensive to purchase and set up, and then fail because people can’t use it, or can’t be bothered to use it. The latter approach will result in a lean minimalist system, easy and fast to use, but the risk is that other departments may reject it because they weren’t consulted.

You need to ask everybody want they want, ask them again what they really need, decide for yourself what the pay off is between functionality, cost and ease of use, then get everybody’s buy in for the final design by cajoling and argument. And people think Kofi Annan’s job is difficult!