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IT | John Tate | 22 Aug 2008

John Tate shares an equation to assess CRM projects.

As the summer draws to an end I have much to look back on. By the time you read this, Team GB should have achieved a record Olympic medal haul and can look forward to 2012 with high hopes. On the personal front my allotment has produced huge quantities of soft fruit, cucumbers and courgettes and  I have again had a battle to get my beetroot and carrots to germinate. To ensure success with vegetables it seems you need to get quite a number of things right. And any one category of failure can result in a poor or non-existent harvest. Watering, weeding, pest control and planting all come into the equation.

CFDG members enjoy the benefit of a free IT helpline, which I run with the support of the CFDG IT steering group. Over the sum-mer the top topic has been CRM, or cus-tomer relationship management systems.

In several cases I was rung to give advice on how to recover a project that was going badly wrong. Always a bit depressing but far too common I’m afraid. The scale of the issues outlined on the calls was signifi-cant. Lots of money had been spent, a huge amount of management and staff time had been absorbed and donors and members and other contacts were adversely impacted.

So why are CRM projects such an issue? There has been a growth in the number of commercial organisations embarking on new CRM projects, which might explain why I have been getting more calls. I hope that it is not because charities are getting worse at implementing new systems, or that vendors are delivering a poorer service.

One thing that is apparent is that over the last couple of years the CRM vendors mar-keting machines have been pushing out a constant stream of messaging about the ben-efits of this technology, all of which sounds very appealing to the potential customer.

“Transform your business for consistent results”. “Act on opportunities and keep cus-tomers satisfied”. “Raise more money whilst reducing costs”. And one vendor promises the chance to: “Experiment with cutting edge fundraising methods and maintain those that work best for your organisation”.

CRM systems have been around for 20 plus years. Many finance directors have been involved with CRM implementations in the past and have seen first hand the issues that these projects face.

To help address this I have developed an equation that I thought might be useful to help assess whether a CRM project has a significant chance of success. Much like growing vegetables you need to get a lot of different things right. The definition is a set of technologies, people and processes that allow all staff to capture information on all points of contact with a stakeholder and to be able to access and report on this in a timely fashion.

CRM project success (%) = TEC*PR*RE*TES *CEO  / 20000

Where 

• TEC = % of in-house skills regarding the technology
• PR = % skill level internally in process re-engineeringRE = % of staff working full-time on the project
• TES = % of key functional requirements of the CRM system fully tested via a pilot
• CEO = Number of days per week the chief executive allocates to support the project

Percentages are included as whole numbers up to 100. So for example if you have rea-sonable skills levels in process re-engineering you might give yourself a score of 75.

I have constructed this equation so that it is possible to get the percentage at more than 100. If your result is well below 100 here are some targets to look at. The targets level for TEC, PR, and TES is 100. Target for RE is 5 per cent. So if you have 100 staff, five should be full-time on the project. This might sound ridiculously high but when you think through the work required …The target for the ceo’s time is half a day a week.

If you score more than 100 per cent  then well done – you have a good chance of success. Less than 75 per cent then start  worrying.

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