DREAM - Live the Change
CRM Created with Appreciative Inquiry
CRM projects impact every part of the business and have stakeholders at every level. Even if the intention is to increase sales through better relationships, these sales can affect production and logistics and be impacted by issues in billing.
Our approach is to bring these stakeholders together and ask them to imagine what this new world will look like and how the business got there. We get them to tell these stories to each other.
From this, we developed the Nonfunctional requirements of the CRM System (Processes, how it needs to work, etc.) and a Change Management Approach.
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Envisage your exceptional
Whole Business Vision
CRM implementations succeed more frequently when a business-wide approach is taken. That’s because changes in one area of the business depend on and affect what happens in other areas of the business.
For example, if sales increase due to a CRM implementation, what impact will this have on production, inventory, and accounts?
We take this Systems Thinking approach by bringing together stakeholders in all these areas to tell their own stories of what these changes will mean and listen to others.
Map the Journey
Just as the stakeholders’ visions may be different, so will their journeys. Understanding these impacts and dependencies is also crucial to developing a successful implementation and change plan.
To do this, we ask the stakeholders to imagine they were already living the Dream and then tell the story from each perspective of what happened to get there.
The stakeholders then share these, listen to the stories from other parts of the business, and understand the impacts and dependencies involved.
How it needs to work
The deliverable from the Vision workshop is to document the non-functional requirements of the CRM.
This means mapping the processes that will bring about the change you want to see across the organisation, identifying how the software needs to support these processes, and explaining how it must work to get adoption.
These Nonfunctional requirements are used in the next phase of the program to create the functional specification for the software itself.
What will Change
The deliverable from the Journey Map is to document a Change Management Plan.
Change Management is crucial in any project but is particularly important for CRM deployments. Success in getting people to do something different is defined by your success in getting them to do it.
We can develop a coherent Change Management plan with the best chance of success by bringing all the stakeholders together and understanding the impacts and dependencies on change across the business.
Why Systems Thinking is important
System thinking teaches us that things can impact a business at a distance and in time.
For example, if the sales team starts writing a lot of business in a specific area that the Product team is not expecting, this will result in poor service sometime later. This can then rebound on Sales and cause initial success to fall back and fail.
Systems Thinking for CRM Projects
CRM is about Managing the relationships of two stakeholder groups (Employees and Clients) for their benefit and that of a third (Shareholders). The impacts and dependencies of changes in these relationships are felt across the business.
So success cannot be built by focusing exclusively on one area, such as Sales or Marketing. It has to include the whole business. Plotting and understanding these dependencies and impacts is Systems Thinking.
Our approach is to bring together people from across the business to imagine and share to identify these inter-relationships. From that, we build nonfunctional requirements and a documented approach to change for the whole business.
Find out more about Systems Thinking in CRM
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