Project Success

Over the long weekend, I had a conversation with a friend and former colleague on the state of the enterprise. The common theme centered on the advances in technology and that projects still fail at an alarming rate. This made me recall an earlier post on project success.

Many many moons ago, I had two clients. Both were large enterprise software companies. Both partnered and competed in various markets. Both were deploying the same CRM product to increase efficiencies in their customer service centers. It is the ideal situation to illustrate project success and failure.

The first company had ambitious plans to deploy across multiple product lines, across multiple service teams and integrate with multiple CRM systems. The plans were big and bold. “We will be your most successful and reference-able customer,” the executive sponsor boasted in the kickoff meeting.

The second company had calculated and negotiated their purchase price based on a cost per call metric. They had a simple goal. We have 18 months to get to positive ROI.

Which company succeeded? It was not the first company.