When implementing Microsoft Dynamics 365, it’s crucial that the system meets both the current and future needs of the business. This means being able to ensure long-term adoption by your workforce, driving lasting change. After all, there is little point having a state of the art platform that doesn’t bring any significant result.
The success of any technology implementation is reliant on your ability to build the right foundations with a good project. This means taking necessary steps to plan the project, involve the right stakeholders, prepare data, undertake technical work and communicate the wider business. It’s a process that requires effort. But done right, you’ll never have to repeat it.
Below, we list the 12 steps to take for your Dynamics 365 project for guarantee long-term success.
1. Build a project team
Before you implement a Microsoft Dynamics 365 project, it’s important to get buy in from several teams across the business. These will be internal ambassadors supporting the project. They’ll also make crucial decisions to the project plan along the way.
In the initial stages, we recommend you form a dedicated project team that includes (as a minimum) an executive sponsor (Director level) and a dedicated project manager. The project manager should be the first point of contact for our Microsoft Dynamics 365 consultants to liaise with throughout the project.
You’ll also need a CRM administrator to oversee the technical requirements and functionality. Then, you need several department champions from each team that will use the solution. They will be able to beta test along the way and make minor amends. The collaboration of various departments also ensures the Microsoft Dynamics 365 solution is designed to accommodate the needs of the business as a whole, increasing user adoption.
By having a dedicated internal team behind your Microsoft Dynamics 365 client projects, you can ensure any external specialist expertise used in the project is shared by as many people within the business as possible. It can also reduce delays by having responsible persons making swift decisions.
2. Define a clear vision of your Dynamics 365 solution
Ask yourself the following questions before you commit to any Microsoft Dynamics 365 project:
- What are the current pinch points you want to alleviate within the business?
- What does project success look like? What will we be able to do with your new system?
- How will the new solution align to the overall business strategy?
- What is the end goal dream solution for the business and when should this be achieved?
Once you have the answers to these, it will become much easier to build a roadmap forward. If you are working with external consultants on the project, be sure to share your vision with them for alignment.
3. Prioritise your CRM goals
The perfect Microsoft Dynamics 365 solution will accommodate hundreds of business goals once fully rolled out. However, when beginning to plan a Dynamics 365 project of any scale, its imperative that you establish what these goals are and prioritise them in to ‘phases’.
This is an efficient way of working, as it enables you to adjust their priorities as the project phases develop and allocate internal resource to each phase. More importantly, by breaking down a large project into phases, you’ll get total transparency of where money is being spent and at what time.
Larger Microsoft Dynamics 365 projects can be costly as a one-off fee, but the phased approach enables the business to budget for each phase. Phases can also be undertaken at a time best suited to the aspirations of the business, keeping the momentum high and maximising internal adoption levels.
4. Agree on KPIs
Before you start on a replacement CRM project, you should benchmark your current performance. This means recording the time it takes to complete tasks, such as lead creation or creating orders, and the total amount of steps it takes to perform each task.
You should also record user adoption levels and get feedback from staff internally about their future CRM improvements. This may help when building your future CRM.
This benchmarking can then be compared to the new solution to demonstrate great improvement, and you can use these stats to showcase the new solution to your users
5. Plan for maximum user adoption
It’s simple: your employees won’t adopt solution if they don’t feel it helps them. This is why user adoption must be taken into account at the initial design stage.
User wants and needs should be collated at the start of the project. Then, the dedicated project team should determine which ones are to be met. They also need to be kept up to date about project developments, alongside communications around why the business is investing in a new system. Most crucially, you need to lay out the benefits they will experience in their roles.
By doing this, your users will feel included in the project itself and hopefully adopt a positive attitude to the project. Before launch, it is also important that users are fully trained to use the solution to maximise its efficiency and adoption.
6. Map out existing business processes
The best way to improve internal processes is to map them all out in their current state. This way, none will be overlooked and the internal project team can analyse them.
After mapping, you can uncover process improvements and define how they will be implemented in the Microsoft Dynamics 365 solution.
With the application suite in Microsoft Dynamics 365, the majority of business processes can be automated within the platform. To remove unnecessary duplications of effort and for maximum business efficiency, these automated processes should be utilised as much as possible. However, this will also require a change in mind-set towards re-engineering processes and embracing automation.
7. Minimising risk
Enterprise-level Microsoft Dynamics 365 projects involve a significant investment. Before starting any project, we recommend significant time is invested in analysing the project risks. Here are some of the most common risks that our clients face with some suggested solutions:
- Users not adopting the solution: Involve your key users early on in the solution design stage to ensure all their needs are being met in the new solution. If they feel these are accommodated, they will likely fully adopt the solution once it’s launched.
- Adjusting existing business processes: Adjusting your business processes can take experimentation and discovery time. By breaking the main project into small sprints, you can trial the new process improvements as they are rolled out. Then, you can further refine them if required.
- Data security: Microsoft house their data in a high secure environment at one of their three GDPR and ISO 27001 compliant data centres within the UK. They also have a comprehensive range of legal documents available on this – so any data concerns should be mitigated.
- Impact on customer experience: We recommend carrying out some initial focus groups with key existing customers where they can make recommendations to improve their overall experience, e.g. refining a process, the method of getting in touch, the email communications they receive. This valuable feedback will contribute to the new solution design and can be reviewed along the way. A good customer experience will likely grow the business as they’ll recommend your business to others.
- Long-term impact: Microsoft Dynamics 365 can accommodate enterprise grade businesses with huge amounts of data and advanced functionality needs. The flexible licensing options and capabilities can be customised to grow at the same pace as your business does. There is no chance of your business outgrowing the solution but your business processes may need a lot of refinement along the way as other elements within the business grow.
8. Managing user privileges
To enable a robust data security model, user privileges must be clearly defined at the start of the project. This ensures that each user is assigned the correct access level when the system goes live.
Restricting access to certain users/departments in the business ensures that your data is kept secure. It is also restricts access to confidential information within your Microsoft Dynamics 365 solution. You are also able to restrict what information can be extracted by employees from the solution, such as reports and exports.
With Microsoft Dynamics 365, user management can be managed centrally by your dedicated project team, avoiding unnecessary additional costs and delays.
9. Plan your Dynamics 365 integrations
All businesses operate in their own unique way. The majority of larger CRM projects integrate with a wide variety of third party applications and data feeds from other sources such as email marketing platforms, finance packages, document management and eCommerce platforms. Microsoft Dynamics 365 is one of the market leading business platforms that can easily integrate with a multitude of third party applications via APIs.
Consider what integrations you need in advance so the project team can ensure they are set up before live, leaving ample time to address any complexities if they arise.
10. Prepare and cleanse your data
The effort involved in consolidating and preparing your data for the migration to a new CRM system is always underestimated. There is little point in importing data to the new system that hasn’t been cleansed, as this will hinder the efficiency of the new platform and may also affect user adoption.
Here are some considerations for data cleansing:
- Establish what specific data needs to be stored within Microsoft Dynamics 365
- Uncover where the data is currently stored
- Decide how historic do you want the data available in the new CRM platform to be e.g. 12 months or 5 years
- Pinpoint who will manage the cleansing of duplicate client data
- Define any additional data fields needing to be captured in the new platform setup
- Decide whether the data be cleansed manually or automatically by a specialist tool
If you are working with external consultants on the project, they should be able to guide you through data preparation prior to launch.
11. Secure your data under GDPR regulations
Data security is an important element to any Microsoft Dynamics 365 project. It’s important to establish how secure your data will be kept within the new CRM platform.
Microsoft offered a comprehensive and highly secure set of compliance offerings and a commitment to security, privacy and transparency alongside GDPR compliance, meaning you can be confident your data is covered.
The data stored within any Microsoft Dynamics 365 solution is either stored in the cloud (using Microsoft Azure) or on-premise via a local server within your business environment. Your business needs to make the decision as to which option is best suited to their needs.
If you opt for the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Cloud hosting option, Microsoft Azure is a highly secure environment for data storage and is GDPR, ISO 27001 and G-Cloud certified. The on-premise option offers greater control of your data however the security of the data itself remains the sole responsibility of the business itself.
12. Understand the importance of continued investment
A newly deployed Microsoft Dynamics 365 solution, if designed and implemented correctly, should meet all the current needs of the business. The platform itself has the capabilities to future proof the majority of business requirements. However, as the business grows, you may need to further invest to implement additional features.
It is also important as you recruit new employees or implement additional functionality that you invest in additional training. This will enable new staff to understand and use the full solution and prevent them learning the shortcuts and workarounds other colleagues have picked up over time. Additional training will also enable existing staff to fully embrace the new functionality once it’s rolled out rather than learn it on the job and risk under utilising the new functionality.
Dynamics 365: your platform for your business’s future
Dynamics 365 is a system built to serve you for the future. Microsoft invest in new functionality and capabilities every year, meaning the platform constantly evolving with the world outside and your shifting needs.
By implementing Dynamics 365 well and utilising features, you can ensure you are getting ongoing value. In the video below, our experts discuss what you can achieve with Dynamics 365, with real-life examples from the system, and how to use them most effectively.
