Setting Up a “Winning” CRM Team Requires Attracting Talent Worthy of Microsoft Dynamics CRM’s Cross-Organizational Applications

The shortage of skilled employees is still one of the biggest challenges in the Microsoft Dynamics CRM world.

Personally I get many calls from headhunters who offer job opportunities worldwide or ask if I know people who qualify for the requested position. The requests usually come from large system integrators, who seem to have trouble finding the high-end skilled people with experience in the CRM market.

The key challenge for system integrators is the fact that their organizations are based on specific knowledge areas, but Microsoft Dynamics CRM requires people with knowledge from different areas. For example, one skill that often is required is analytical skill for business intelligence.

Companies can try set up a team and select each team member from a required knowledge group, but usually this results in a lack of chemistry within the team. Another common method is to build a core team and extend it with knowledge specialists, but how to find cross knowledge specialist?

In my experience, finding the combination between Microsoft Dynamics CRM and technical skills is very unusual. The challenge for setting up your team becomes more difficult due to these unusual combinations of required skills. Nevertheless, with the release of Microsoft Dynamics 4.0, a breakdown in required skills becomes a little easier. In this latest release, we see that the skills required are increased, but it is easier to separate them and assign them to different team members.

The areas of knowledge could be divided into four general areas: project management, functional, technical, and data migration. Within these areas you could define different roles e.g. roles mentioned in Microsoft Sure Step Methodology.

The project management requires, depending on length and type of the project, a very flexible approach-- ...