On-going resourcing

15. January 2010 by admin.

In a recent article in CIO, the topic of resourcing SAAS projects is discussed, with a focus on CRM applications.  SaaS (software-as-a-service, an aspect of “cloud computing”), you may recall, is where companies surrender aspects of their critical data to be housed “somewhere" else” and accessible via an application they do not own but merely rent only while the Internet connection remains available.  The author, David Taber, asks “if you’re using a SaaS CRM system, when should you be thinking about the implementation team as "staffing-as-a-service?"  CRM projects can represent a big investment of IT personnel.  Perhaps they too should be sitting in the clouds?

Taber concludes “Given the likelihood of change, even if your staff is extremely constrained, no part of the CRM work should be done entirely by outsiders. Your organization will need internal capabilities to develop and manage the system going forward.  That said, it’s also not a great idea to have major parts of the project done without any outside input. There are certain parts of the project that you don’t really want to get good at: technologies that provide you no particular leverage, or processes (such as data cleansing) that are incredibly boring or time-consuming. Consultants also bring valuable lessons from other implementations, and they can help you develop best practices in areas such as sales processes or Agile project management.”

A second section discusses on-going operational resourcing.  The article is called CRM Team Staffing Inside or Out.

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