I Need An Electronic List

by Anonymous

I was contracted to work on a CRM project for a MAJOR computer company (which shall remain nameless) in the early days of CRM. Actually, the term CRM wasn't even in use yet and it was being called SFA (sales force automation). The client of this major computer company was also a very high profile company.

When I met with the professional services team in their offices, the project manager (who had been onsite living in a client-paid condo for 3 months) was prepared to discuss the project deliverables. I was eager to see all of the detail but was a little unsettled that they had said this was a 2-3 week project. This guy was onsite or 3 months?

So, I asked him to review his documentation. And he proceeded to pull out 3 pieces of paper. He held the first one up as he said "The first requirement is they need electronic forms". The piece of paper had 5-6 bullets on it which appeared to be the form names he came up with.

He quickly moved on to the second piece of paper and said "The second requirement is they need electronic lists". This piece of paper had 8-10 bullets on it with simple list names. So far, this was nice overview since I was fairly new to this stuff.

He then pulled out the last piece of paper and said "The last requiement is they need electronic processes". This had 3-4 items on it in bullet format.

Well, now that I had my overview, I asked for the supporting detail. His response, "Ask away". No, I'd like to read it first. He turned white, as did the other 6 members on of the professional services team.

You see, this project manager had recently retired from his career on the production line. So what the company had done as a perk was to hire him back as a consultant/project manager in the professional services area (they developed and implemented software).

It was clear to me by the facial expressions, that they were as shocked as I was. I thanked him but said I didn't have any questions at this time. A meeting was quickly reconvened without him where I was assured that this situation would be resolved.

Keep in mind, the product they were using was a personal information manager. So it didn't lend itself to the customization that most CRM developers enjoy today. So I wasn't expecting there to be much anyway. I was doing projects that sounded like this for less than $30,000 total at that point.

6 months later, and $75,000 of travel budget used, we had documented the requirements as I developed. I invented new techniques with the product that I thought were fairly amazing, but the performance stunk and there was no way around it. Most of these custom process were based on chained DDE calls. If you know what that is, you know that's slow!

I performed training as the project manager nervously bit his fingernails. It was obvious based on the questions and confusion that he had spent no time with the majority of these key users (I found out later he had co-deigned it with the VP of Sales Administrative Assistant).

My job was done but I didn't have a good feeling. A week later I was contacted by my professional services contact saying that I may be contacted by an internal review group. Obviously, there had been a complaint. Fortunately, I had a 2 foot high pile of CYA emails so I was good. I had started questioning things the day after I agreed to do the project :)

The PM retired suddenly (again) and I'm not really sure what happened after that. I'm pretty certain the nearly $1 million invested for a PIM based solution for 50 users didn't get the ROI they were hoping for.