Article

Change management best practices for your Dynamics 365 CE project: Understand change as a process

by Heidi Neuhauser
Partner, Reenhanced

When you are planning for a Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Experience project or enhancement, change is coming to your organization. That change won’t be a one-time experience from which your users simply move on. To properly address its impact, your organization must prepare to adapt and accept change as a process and not a one-time event.

If you are part of the team leading the CRM deployment, understanding the typical stages that organizations go through when adopting change will help you gauge your progress, manage your efforts, and adapt to challenges that arise. This article kicks off a series on Change Management in Dynamics 365 projects and enhancements. Future articles will look at topics including readiness, creating a change management team, communication, and training.

Let’s look at a standard, simple CRM project lifecycle (the below represents a waterfall approach) and overlay it with a standard Change Curve:

[caption caption="Dynamics 365 Project lifecycle applied to a standard Change Curve"][/caption]

  • Project Kick-off: You’ve invited stakeholders, end users and management to help kick off the project! Expectations are all over the place: excitement, fear, confidence, uncertainty. Performance and motivation are at a baseline level on the standard Change Curve.
  • Requirements: You’re being heard by your Partner and Project team! All of your wish list items are being captured. Excitement is high!
  • Development: Your partner and project team are busy building the system per requirements in the prior stage and working off of a mutually approved project plan. As development begins and continues, you wonder: were the requirements we gathered correct? ...

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About Heidi Neuhauser

Heidi is a Partner at Reenhanced. She is a Microsoft MVP for Business Applications and is passionate about user adoption, out-of-the-box configuration tools, Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform.

More about Heidi Neuhauser