9.4. Winning and Keeping Support
Winning and maintaining support for your program may not guarantee success, but the absence of broad-based support will ensure program failure. It's very important to include each of the following as part of your overall project charter.
9.4.1. Involve Key People
Involving key people in the strategic planning process is an important first step. Keeping them involved is also important. Your steering committee members and project team members should be in contact with a network of key players throughout the business (especially in their functional areas). They should be a focal point for bringing together perspectives and input on all key decisions, and they should be responsible for communicating the decisions back to their organizations. Especially in a large organization, you must keep key players engaged.
9.4.2. Leadership
In Chapter 7, we discussed the importance of program leadership. There are three key levels: the executive sponsor who is your strong advocate to the executive team, program governance through a steering committee or chief customer officer, and program management (which actually governs the individual projects).
9.4.3. Communicate, Communicate, Communicate
It just cannot be said often enough. The most important thing you can do to maintain support for your CRM program is to communicate your vision and your progress honestly and often. You can use these tools to support internal communications:
Bulletin boards
E-mail
Your company's intranet
Company publications
Coffee talks and other department meetings
If you have an experienced internal communications department, work with these employees early. If you don't have one, I strongly suggest hiring a consultant with an internal communications practice. In either case, these communication experts will work with you to develop a formal communications plan.
This simple step can make the difference between visible and widely heralded success and anonymous failure. Most of us don't really think of the need for communication; after all, if you're doing the right thing everyone should know it, right? Wrong. No one will know it unless you tell him or her. You cannot communicate your key messages too often. To paraphrase an old adage, “Tell them what you're going to do, tell them what you're doing, and tell them what you did.”
Honest communication is as important as constant communication. If part of the project changes or even fails, admit it. No revisionism! Sure, it is important to have success; we're doing everything we can to set ourselves up for success. But no human endeavor is ever perfect. Discussing some key learning that has modified a direction midstream lends credibility. Even if you do something really wrong, it's better to admit it and describe what you now know to do differently, rather than pretending you never intended to go there anyway. I hope that you work for a company that believes if you're not making any mistakes, you're not trying hard enough. If you don't work for a company like that, why in the world are you trying to do CRM anyway?
Now that we have our project blueprints, we are ready to turn things over to the project team who will actually develop the infrastructure components. Chapter 10 will introduce the steps for developing infrastructure and how they apply to each of the components.