Building an Implementation Team

KCRM initiatives are necessarily collaborative: Implementation teams must be representative of the actual needs for strengthening customer relationships through customer knowledge management. They must include mid-level and high-level managerial participants, and external business partners who represent a variety of functional specialties.

Chasm: a figurative separation between adopters and skeptics of a new technology or paradigm. People who adopt that new technology or paradigm are said to have the chasm. For example, when the internet became available to the public, people who actively created it come first on the curve and were called innovators; People who adopted it immediately (“crossed the chasm”) can be described as early adopters or visionaries, those who followed; masses that soon followed are described as the early majority.

Laterality: The ability of team members to accommodate other members’ different backgrounds, values, skills, perspectives, and assumptions to effectively collaborate across functional and organizational boundaries.

Team must be boundary spanning: Implementation teams extend beyond your own business’ boundaries; internal and external coordination must be facilitated by high team-level laterality. Pre- and post-chasm membership ensures that there is a healthy dose of optimism and a healthy dose of skepticism and realism in team-level decisions.

Balancing conflicting requirements in an art: various requirements of designing a KCRM strategy and system will contradict others. Managerial and technological skills must be well balanced. Senior management involvement helps diffuse political tensions and conflict among team members.

Leadership must be unanimously accepted by all participants:Many team members may not be from your own organization. Rather than spinning wheels over who is in control, the team leader must act as a facilitator for collaboration, not as an issuer of directives. Managing internal dynamics, translation of needs, task delegation, user and customer involvement, and co-assignment of customer classifications are some of the responsibilities that fall on the leader’s shoulders.

Risk must be prioritized jointly: use the risk assessment framework to determine threats and risks that are within the team’s control and those that are not. Once the controllable risk are being well managed, address the less-controllable ones by “selling” the project to front-line staff and being attuned to external business changes.