IN YOUR OWN WORDS no plagiarism

Read the case study carefully . And answer the question in your own language

What do you think is the most important constraint of the CRM project? Is it the timeline (schedule), the budget (project cost) or the scope (what will be delivered)? Select one option.. Please explain your choice.

Introduction: This Case Study is based on an actual business project. The name of the organization has been replaced by the fictional name of "Good Products Inc" to maintain confidentiality. Good Products Inc. ("Good Products") is a very successful UK based multinational corporation (MNC) with operations in more than 60 countries and regions. Good Products is a consumer goods corporation that defines its purpose as helping people live healthier lives. They employ over 40,000 people in 6 continents. Since the late 1800s, Good Products has been widely successful in Europe. In 2018, with a desire to continue their global expansion, they acquired a consumer goods company in New Jersey, USA. Good Products' CEO, Philip Cowell was very proud of his latest acquisition. Integrating this newly acquired company presented many challenges. The American company's information technology systems were quite antiquated. In addition, organizational cultures were very different. Good Products often changed the "rules" in the industry and hired innovative leaders who were not afraid to make mistakes. The Good Products organization was also very skilled at managing change. They were committed to empowering teams to experiment and learn. This was a key success factor behind their continued international growth. On the other hand, the American company was very invested in an accelerating stock price and heavily penalized executives who failed to achieve goals. In addition, the organizational structures of the two companies were very different. Good Products had a product orientation and the American company was highly fragmented along functional lines. This fragmentation often resulted in a lot of departmental conflict. Given the breadth of organizational change required, Good Products hired a management consulting firm to help them successfully complete the integration of the newly acquired American company. Lynne Harris was a project management professional from the management consulting firm. Lynne was asked to put together a plan to implement Good Products' CRM system (Salesforce) into the newly acquired American company's operations. Before beginning this assignment in New Jersey, she spent 3 weeks with Good Products' architecture development team located at the company headquarters in London, England. This gave her an opportunity to review how Salesforce was configured for the Good Products organization. Lynne had just finished a project assignment with Good Products' Home Health Division in France and she was eager to remain with this organization as she had developed many wonderful relationships. Lynne and her former project team received a significant bonus for their success as they finished their last assignment significantly under budget and ahead of schedule. Lynne was confident her success with Good Products would continue and themanagement consulting firm that employed her was happy to see her take on this new assignment. Lynne was tasked with migrating all of the American company's systems over to the standard Good Products platforms. The first project was the migration of Good Products CRM platform. This would be followed by two additional projects: 1) the standardization of the Human Resources Management (HRM) "system" (policies, processes and technology) and 2) the standardization of the Financial Management "system" (FMS) (policies, processes and technology). With respect to the CRM platform at the newly acquired American company, it was a "home grown" order entry platform and it was not cloud based. This was a real challenge for the sales and service teams as they were largely mobile. This significant shortcoming caused the majority of sales representatives to hold their customer information in their own Excel spreadsheets. This meant that the customer information was very decentralized and out of sync with the American company's official corporate records. In addition, many of departments in the American company operated like independent silos versus an integrated organization. For instance, the American company's Marketing Department struggled to get an accurate picture of current client needs and they got little support from the Sales and Service organization. The Marketing Department's promotional efforts suffered as a result. For instance, most of the email campaigns failed to result in any new sales as almost 40% of the emails "bounced back" as undeliverable. Not having current client information was really impeding sales. Getting the sales representatives to use Global Products' cloud-based CRM system would be very challenging. Aside from the data integration issues, the VP of Sales and Service at the newly acquired American company was a highly independent and competitive individual who was not concerned about the success of other departments. The VP, Roger Coleman, gave his team aggressive targets and he just wanted results. In addition, it was well known that he was not supportive of the company's recent acquisition by Good Products. Roger feared the loss of his independence and worse yet, he assumed that the new CRM system would allow the executives at Good Products to monitor the results of his team and impose additional approval requirements. Rogers thought of all this was unnecessary bureaucracy. In the end, the only thing Roger felt good about was the fact that Lynne Harris would simultaneously report to him and Philip Cowell, the CEO of Good Products. Roger was given the authority to decide which members of his sales and service teams would be "on loan" to the project. Roger made it well known that he would not allow the CRM project to get in the way of his ability to achieve his sales goals. Since his team was struggling to meet their sales targets and this was causing the American company to experience some financial pressures, Roger didn't want any distractions.Lynne knew that this project was going to be challenging. The CEO of Good Products wanted the CRM system to be in place at newly acquired American company within 8 months as he promised his Board a quick and seamless acquisition. A challenge of this magnitude required people with considerable expertise. Lynne was fortunate to have most of the business 2page consultants she worked with on the last project join her on this CRM project. The consulting firm allowed this as Good Products was an important client for the firm. With the sales and service representatives from the American company acting as the end users on the project, Lynne's final step was to get the remaining subject matter experts from the client organizations. She wanted subject matter experts from the UK that were part of the original rollout of the CRM system in Good Products. These subject matter experts were necessary because Lynne would have to oversee a wide range of work on the project. Some of the key aspects of the work include sales and service process redesign, system configuration, business analytics, testing, procedure development, end user training, sales/service job redesign, people change management and implementation. She also asked for an experienced Project Coordinator that could assist her with all the project management deliverables of the project. During one of Lynne's planning sessions with the newly formed international team, she was told the American company's IT managers would impose numerous levels of approvals. After speaking with many of the sales and service representatives in the American company, Lynne learned that the IT department valued tight controls. Lynne was concerned about the controls so she decided to speak to the VP of Sales and Service. Roger was not interested in getting involved. He told her the IT and Sales/Service departments had their own goals and both were struggling to achieve them. They agreed to stay out of each other's way and this was not going to change for this project. Lynne was grateful for this experience, as challenging as it was, because it gave her some early insights into the stakeholder management challenges that await her. "End of Case Study*