When does organic growth becomes viral?

Some managed scope creep during a project is normal and in a green field site implementation to be expected as the requirements become a prototype and then a system, additional context is achieved and can sometimes lead to a necessary extension to scope.

In the early stages of a project – especially where users may never have had to think of what they do in terms of process steps, inputs/outputs etc etc and everything else we get them to consider during the requirements gathering phase – this is just part of the iterative nature of xRM projects, however there is a fine line between getting the business decision makers to consider things relevant to the purpose of the xRM implementation without opening it up to everything they have done, currently do or might possibly one day consider doing…

In this case it is the inherent universal relevance of xRM that has become the implementation teams worst enemy to a degree.  Now that the approach has been demonstrated to them and there is an understanding that ‘yes it can do that’ and ‘no it won’t take 6 months’ there is a liberal amount of enthusiasm surrounding the prioritisation process for change requests, new requests and what if requests coming through from the client.

We are increasingly finding ourselves drawing back to the original business case and objectives to be the sanity check for the should we and will we decision that these requests require.

So far the client is onboard with this and we are trying to capture the enthusiasm and flood of ideas coming up from the floor as part of the next round of the engagement however it is an interesting reminder again of too much of a good thing…

Role based Wiki’s

First it was blogs – then podcasts – now wikis…

The Microsoft Dynamics ISV evangelism team has recently launched a wiki for MS Dynamics CRM enabling implementors, ISV’s, customers, partners, lovers and haters of MSCRM to wiki their way to enlightenment.  Check it out here.

The issue with all content on the web is the sifting of what’s relevant for me in trying to do the thing i am attempting to do right now.  A wiki may be the answer, or it may be something that is ok to a point but then can’t scale.  I will be watching this as well as the slightly older SalesLogix one with interest to see if there is any relevance at a local level.

We are currently rolling out a vertical solution where the concept of an internal forum amongst the user community (which is across agencies but in the same industry) where resources, help, tips and queries can be managed. 

As i have mentioned earlier we are using collab tools for the project team however are needing something that is anonymous-ish and readily available to the broader non project team user community. Perhaps a wiki will do..