Prone to Failure: Why CRM and Billing Systems Implementations Are High Risk

What Went Wrong?

It is difficult to attribute a single factor during the problems encountered in any of these case studies. Each situation was generated by multiple reasons, which can be categorized around four areas:

• Intrinsic project complexity
• Platform limitations
• Project management shortfalls
• Limited implementation capabilities

Intrinsic project complexity:

Implementation of a billing or a CRM application in a telecommunications carrier is an exceedingly complex project⁵. It is remarkable, however, that all of the projects studied exhibited, in addition to their natural complexity, specific features that made them, by choice, even more complicated.

Project complexity at the European wireline incumbent was driven by multiple factors: 1) The carrier’s sheer size (more than 30 million wireline subscribers, combined with 5,000 products); 2) the number of end users supported by the application (35,000, of which up to 20,000 accessed it concurrently); and 3) the technical design comprised an abstract interface layer, which had not been developed before and had to be tailored to the carrier’s business processes.

A lot of the complexity at the Asia/Pacific wireless subsidiaries was driven by the scope of replacing simultaneously the main transaction systems at three operators. As such, while the size of operations was relatively small (4.5 million subscribers), the requirements gathering phase was more complex since it meant addressing needs from three different carriers.

Similarly, the project complexity at the Latin American carrier originated in the objective to simultaneously replace the CRM application both at the wireline and wireless businesses; this situation was magnified by reducing the implementation timeline beyond what was reasonable.

In the case of the North American wireless carrier, the complexity was induced by the software vendor. In response to the vendor’s commercial aggressiveness, the carrier purchased the entire CRM library without having a precise vision of what it intended to achieve with it. This put the carrier in a position to have to implement all modules simultaneously.

The obvious question that these facts raise is whether management at each carrier could have reduced the implementation risk by limiting the additional features, which increased the project complexity.