Humble Mumbles

The second CRM Incubation Week happened last week in the Microsoft Technology Center in Waltham, MA. Through the Dynamics CRM Incubation Weeks, Sanjay Jain  has been doing a fabulous job of helping people with great ideas of developing a solution in MS Dynamics CRM to give shape to their ideas and connecting them with the VCs who may be interested in funding any of these ideas. The panel of advisors who help these teams were top notch professionals from the Dynamics CRM world

1) Jim Steger from Sonoma Partners

2) Girish Raja from Microsoft

3) Sumit Virmani from Microsoft

4) John O'Donnell, from Microsoft

5) Aaron Elder from Ascentium

6) Richard Crane from Microsoft

The idea was to be able to build a POC that can showcase MS Dynamics CRM as a XRM Platform and also present the solution to VCs. The companies that participated this time around were

1) FourthLink 

2) Smart Red Pen

3) Skyline Vertical Solutions

4) myStaffingCRM

5) Hippamatic

The teams came with wonderful ideas that the advisors helped convert into a XRM based solution. The results were amazing to see. In 4 days, these teams had to build a POC and create a business model presentation. The work started at 9 AM in the morning and went till 11 PM in the night.  And in some cases, the teams stayed up all night to get their work done.

Proteans provided support from the offshore. The role of Proteans was to help these teams build their solution. This is one of the most challenging experiences i have had i.e. to help build 5 solutions at the same time with the help of the offshore software team in just 3 days. It required tremendous agility, dedication and patience from everybody involved, both onsite and offshore. The team at Proteans India worked 2 continuous days trying to meet the needs of the participating teams. That was an herculean effort by the team there under the leadership of Paramdeep Kour and Sukhbir Kalsi.

It is not easy to develop a collaboration model and develop a software with the help of an offshore team in 4 days. All the advisors and the teams were patient, supportive and tremendously helpful. And the offshore team worked tirelessly round the clock to get the job done. Additional support was provided by Rich and Jason, architects at Microsoft to help resolve any issues.

In the end, it was a great experience everyone had lots of takeaways and some teams taking away some trophies too. For Proteans, both the incubation weeks have been tremendous learning experiences. Personally, it was a great experience for me to be there and be a part of the entire pressure situation. Thanks to the advisors, the teams, Sanjay and the team in India, I learnt a lot of things in just 4 days.

Follow live commentary from Sanjay on his blogs http://blogs.msdn.com/sanjayjain/archive/2009/04/20/day1-of-2nd-crm-incubation-week.aspx

Well, a lot of people have written about this. Fixed cost projects in Agile methodology. The simple and the best post that i have come across related to this is written by Martin Fowler (Here). 

The primary thing that any customer wants to know when he wants to do a project or build a product is what is his investment. This is very critical in case of projects because it is primarily an investment from which they are not going to make any money. And then when doing the project there are the typical cost overruns, change requests etc.

So, a few things that could help any customer may be tell them

1) An estimate based on the initial requirements and based on that an estimated cost which they could use for a high level budgeting.

2) The requirements given for estimation will not be treated as the complete scope of work development.

3) It is natural that the requirements will change as we start work and changes will not be treated as CRs instead these changes will be used to build a better product than envisioned at the start.

4) The cost will be based on the effort put in for the delivery and not the budget given initially. So it is important tha they prioritize the features that can win them the market.

5) Identify a product owner who will monitor the product development and not just an archiectect who will create an architectural magic

There are lots of advantages and value add for a customer and this should help writing a good win-win contract for developing a fixed cost project the agile way.

One thing that i have realized after my recent implementation experiences is that it is always better to start a CRM Implementation after showing the a big group of end users. I am talking this from an Indian market perspective.

One of the interesting (also irritating many times) problems with the Indian market is the fact that Indians are very tech savvy. Now, tech savvy does not mean an \understanding of technology. It only means that they have tried out the basics of so many applications and played around a little with software.

So when you do a complete implementation based on their requirements and show a demo to these users, they start going like this

1) Why can't i update an opportunity this way ?

2) Why can't i see the contacts?

3) Why don't you guys have a grid?

4) Why is this working this way and not that way?

By the time we finish a demo, we realize that we have not shown what we wanted to show. There may be loads of features but people don't have the patience to see. They immediately start comparing another software with this.

Well, i don't see anything wrong with their questions or their comparison. Some of them have only been thought provoking and not disturbing. But many a times, they do not understand amount of the flexibility mandates some compromises.

So, the way i guess we could start is to demonstrate the vanilla version of MS CRM and if possible ask them to play around with it for a couple of days. Let them get a feel of things and then customize the system to meet their needs. Then it feels like magic to them and they start appreciating the changes done to meet their needs.

May be this is just the result of my interactions with my end users but i have managed to do one implementation by starting off with a demo of the vanilla version and then another demo once the customizations were complete. The client was happy. So, though the blog may be from one kind of a personal experience, the method seems to make a logical sense to me.

One of my strong beliefs once i understood MS CRM and its architecture is that it is a good development platform for any application and not just

I always referred to the the system as a great combination entity and workflow engines.

Think about it in the simplest possible way, it is a BPM like platform with lots of features. You create an entity and its attributes, you have

1) A data structure

2) A list screen

3) A data update screen

Cool stuff in about 10 minutes you have a working application screen ready.

What more? It is already integrated with your AD. It gives you reporting abilities. With 4.0 you can create workflows to meet some of you additional business needs. You have email integration and outlook integration.

This is not to say that use CRM for every application you need to build. There is a cost involved and you also need to see the alignmnt of your application with the system before you take a decision.

Voila!!!you have a really simple and cool application development platform.

So, here i am talking about it in very layman, very basic terms and there, another man thought better than I. His name is David Yack. He wrote a wonderful book "The CRM Book - CRM as a Rapid Application Development Platform" (www.TheCRMBook.com) .

Thank you Mr.Yack.Go grab your copy of the book.

Now that my life revolves around MS CRM 4.0 i decided to start posting my experience with MS CRM 4.0 here.

My experience with workflows in MS CRM 4.0 has been nothing close to impressive. The workflow touted to be one of the most important features has been nothing short of a pain.

Some key problems that you should keep in mind when using workflows

1) Keep them minimal or avoid them if you can :)

2) A record would get added to the asyncoperationsbase table whenever your workflow is executed. The table does not get cleared and is usually loaded with millions of records very soon.

3) Duplicate Detection and all async processes add records to this table too..

The result is workflows stop executing after a period of time or they become very slow and erratic. My experience with getting support for workflow issues have not been great either. Even the support team seems to be at a loss as to why a workflow would not get executed.

You can find some code here to delete workflow logs here http://www.fkbase.info/index.php?q=node/18. This code marks the records for deletion but does not remove it from the table actually which is not good enough. So you may have to delete the records manually from the table. This is not a supported way but if you don't want extremely angry customers within 2 months of the implementation.

Note, it is better to execute the code given in that blog every week or so. It is very slow when the table has loads of records.

As a product, MS CRM 4.0 is surely much much mature, but workflows are not mature enough yet.