Project Management CRM Best Practices - Managing Risk

This is the continuation and the last post regarding the phases of Project Management CRM best practices.

Today I will write about managing the risk. After the managing scope definition has been set (see my previous post about Managing Scope), we can start to managing the risk.

The biggest challenge in a project is to identify risks up front, because there are too many variables in a project, starting with infrastructure, resources or solution, cause by the fact we are expecting some kind of performance or feature and don't work and we need to redesign the all or part of the concept. This happen to me in the last CRM 2013 project that i think the security model that i implement will work fine applying security field but One of the big limitations of Field Security in previous versions of Dynamics CRM was that it was only available on custom fields and not on out of the box fields. In Dynamics CRM 2015 however Field Security can now be enabled on most out of the box fields, with only certain system fields such as the primary key/primary field or status/status reason not having Field Security as an option, and i have other issue cause by the fact the entity was created as organization level and not user level not allowing me to implement an shared record security model. And the entire security model had to be redesign. 

When the planning work is occurring, the project team should identify all known risks. For each risk, they should also determine the probability that the risk event will occur and the potential impact on the project, one of the most common risk is the time spend on installation just because the service user don’t have access, even after we advise the client before the project start or scope creep, other examples could be given. Those events identified as high-risk should have specific plans put into place to mitigate them so they do not occur. Medium risks should be evaluated to see whether they need to be proactively managed. For medium risk we may identify as assumptions like creating a mock-up that we know for sure will be changed and we know that the form will have 30 fields instead of 150, this kind of assumptions could help us to estimate and the outcome is much more probable. Continue to assess potential risks throughout the project once the project begins and periodically perform an updated risk assessment to determine whether other risks have surfaced that need to be managed. Bear in mind always the features that the new CRM releases are coming if you are working online or offline, this is really important an can give some implications or could solve halt of your issues, like for example the new features available in CRM 2016 will help you on reporting or data analysis. Microsoft is now giving us new features ever single year, and big jumps have being made, and sometimes this could cause some impact on your project, especially if you are working online.

Issues are big problems, so try to resolve as quickly as possible. For instance, if you are migrating an organization data from on-premises to online and on that organization you have FieldOne or Adxstudio solutions and then you see that by importing data throw spreadsheets that will not work and you basically, in my case I had to rewrite all the XrmToolKit so the import could be done. So the project manager should manage this kind of open issues to ensure that they are being resolved. If there is no urgency to resolve the issue or if the issue has been active for some time, it may not really be an issue, because the user simply considers that is just nice to have and It may not be a potential problem (risk), or it may be an action item that needs to be resolved at some later point. Real issues, by their nature, must be resolved with a sense of urgency, but always prioritize them.