Planning to Deploy CiviCRM in your Organization

Last week the DC CiviCRM Meetup group had a great session on planning to deploy CiviCRM within their organization. There were roughly 15 people in attendance. While there are unique considerations to take into consideration when putting together a CiviCRM, the fundamentals of any technology implementation are the same:

• Put together a team, with organization-wide representation, which will evaluate the organizations needs and plan for the technology implementation and assign one person to be an internal project manager.
• Gather information from your organization which help your team determine the organization's goals, current use of technology, various (and sometimes competing) requirements, and various use cases.
• Prioritize the various needs which have been gathered and create a requirements document which can be used to create an RFP and/or guide evaluation of CRM systems.
• Create a technology plan which documents your goals, timeline, budget, and success metrics. It usually helps to break this up into a phased approached over a year or two year period.
• Perform a skills and capacity assessment to determine what level of in-house knowledge there is to support this system, how much training will be needed, and what outside support will need to be brought in to support the deployment and maintenance long term.
• Gather as much information of the data you have in various forms (both on and offline) and determine which data will go into your CRM. Go through a mapping exercise where you determine how your data will transfer into your new CRM system.

The last two items, the technology plan and skills and capacity assessment, are generally the make it or break it points for technology implementations. I, as well as others present, could not stress the importance of doing as much up front planning as possible. You will never get every requirement up front, but if done well you can come out with 90-95% of the specifications for your system. We all had some common lessons learned from CiviCRM implementations which people found valuable when thinking of their implementations. Things you should keep in mind when planning your implementation:

• Don't allow too many hands in the pot when planning the implementation. You can run into a disasterous situation if you try to make critical decisions by organizational consensus.
• Take the time to plan for hosting of CiviCRM. Your needs will vary from implementation to implementation, but this can take some considerable time to plan.
• Don't assume that CiviCRM does something one way because another system you know does. Civi is it's own unique systems with its strengths and weaknesses. Spend the time learning how Civi does things and so you can plan accordingly.

There are also some areas which I call "budget eaters", items which if not planned accordingly can really lead to bloat in your project budget. I have seen this happen when:

• Configuring CiviMail
• Troubleshooting payment processor integration
• Advanced CMS integration

I attached my slides from the presentation if anyone is interested in taking a look. Let me know if you have any questions or post other insights you have into the CiviCRM planning process.