- Getting to Business Value
- Developing a Model of Your Customer Relationship
- Setting Business Goals
- Setting Requirements: Who, Where, What, and Why
- Organizing and Publishing Project Documents
- Prioritizing Requirements
- When Requirements Should Bend
- Knowing Your Boundaries
- Making the Business Case
- Quantifying the Return
- Developing a Straw-Man Schedule
- Avoiding the Big Bang Project
- Outsourcing
- Setting Executive Expectations
- Getting the Right Resources Committed
Setting Business Goals
Before you drill down into any of the details, it’s important to define a set of business goals that transcend individual requirements. These goals are best stated as numerical performance objectives1 that are not currently being achieved but are easily communicated to executives, such as these examples:
- Improving calls-per-day to 55
- Shortening the sales cycle by two weeks
- Increasing the conversion or close rate by 20%
- Lowering the cost of customer acquisition by 15%
- Increasing the average order size by $10,000
- Increasing revenues by 20%
- Increasing gross profitability by 10%
- Improving customer retention to 80%
- Increasing customer lifetime value by 10%
- Decreasing customer service complaints by 30%
- Decreasing incorrect orders to 1%
Of course, you can’t have everything. Keep the list as short as politically feasible. But no matter how many metrics there are, upper management must prioritize them. These figures of merit will be important touchstones for prioritizing the features and process changes that will be done in the course of the SFDC implementation.