Note to PMOs: Own Your Organization's CRM System

Robert (Bob) Bulger is the 2016 recipient of the Kerzner Award for Excellence in Project Management. He is currently writing in areas focusing on improving organizational success through innovative approaches to benefits realization, stakeholder engagement, and benefit mapping. His latest areas of interest embrace how agility factors into organizational project management and strategy.

  CRM   Estimating   PMO   Stakeholder Management  

It’s time for PMOs to start absorbing the customer relationship management (CRM) practices of their organizations. If you think about it from a project management or PMO perspective, the project setup starts with CRM and the first entry a salesperson or account manager makes. Having PMOs act as the central hub for sales, business analysis and finance creates systems that allow for more efficient tracking of costs, helping management understand capture costs as a component of project profitability.

All too often, marketing and capture costs are nebulous. It’s time to shed some light on those costs, and at the same time help portfolio managers understand the real projected cost of project acquisition through execution.

Step One: System Setup
Luckily, CRM systems are plentiful, allowing organizations many different price points for entry. Most of the concepts presented here are platform agnostic; but that said, you’ll find a large-market system like Microsoft’s Dynamics CRM or Salesforce highly customizable and easy to set up.

First and foremost, I recommend that the PMO either run the selection project or work closely with the business analysts to ensure that the PMO’s needs are incorporated. All too often, the sales or marketing department will glom onto the CRM project and shut everyone else out. We in the PMO know how to ensure our …

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