Do you need a CRM?

Lots of organisations of all sizes and sectors use Customer Relationship Management and Project Management software when they don’t really need to.

There is a tipping point for every organisation where the level of complexity of managing these systems is less than that of managing customer relationships and projects using other systems (which almost always means spreadsheets). When that tipping point is reached, then it’s worth the investment of implementing these complicated systems, but that tipping point is much higher than most organisations think it is.

If they undertook some process design work and sought to reduce the complexity in their current processes, and clarify the processes that everyone across the organisation uses within their workflows, they would achieve much better customer relationship and project management . But instead, they turn to technology systems to solve the problems that are created by poor process, and expecting the technology to enforce the process and solve the problem.

If you’re thinking of introducing a CRM or Project Management system do yourself a favour and focus on understanding and improving your processes first. You might find that the problem you’re actually trying to solve is to reduce complexity and that introducing a new system isn’t going to achieve that. Even if you still go ahead with a new system, at least you’ll be able to implement it more effectively because you’ll know how things work.