Assistus

Consultancy Drives Project Success and Cuts Costs with Proven Methodology

With a growing business around Microsoft Dynamics® CRM, Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner Assistus needed a way to streamline deployments and set clear expectations with customers to ensure optimal solution alignment, drive adoption, and eliminate unplanned costs. To achieve this, the company turned to Microsoft Dynamics Sure Step, which provides a range of tools and templates that cover Microsoft Dynamics solutions from presales to implementation and ongoing support. Now, with Sure Step, the company is consistently ahead on project-delivery timelines, avoids budget overruns, and effectively manages change requests. And because Assistus can store its project information, including custom code, in Sure Step as templates, the company benefits from economies of scale through repeatability, enabling it to improve margins or cut costs on competitive bids to win more business.

We can now complete a complex implementation of Microsoft Dynamics CRM in only one or two months, a 60 percent reduction from projects before Sure Step. Ryan Mullaney, President and CEO, Assistus

Situation

Based in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, Assistus is a Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner with 15 employees and a strong focus in implementing and customizing Microsoft Dynamics® CRM. When first offering Microsoft Dynamics CRM, the company lacked a deployment methodology. Ryan Mullaney, President and CEO of Assistus, recalls, “Not having a methodology led to a number of difficulties: projects could go over budget or over time, or we could simply have poor communications with our customers.” Mullaney goes on to explain that poor communications could lead to gaps between customers’ expectations and the finished solution, which made it difficult to identify whether change requests were in or out of the initial project spec.

“A common problem when deploying a solution is that you are not just getting requirements from one person, rather you are getting them from about five to a potentially unlimited number of people,” adds Mullaney. “If you don’t have a methodology for acquiring a fixed list of requirements up front, there is no way to know what an actual change is later on, which easily leads to budget overruns.”

To grow Assistus’s business around implementing and customizing Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Mullaney understood that his company would need to find a method for capturing project information up front and managing all stages in the deployment life cycle. “We needed a way to follow a customer’s design and meet those requirements in a cost-effective manner,” says Mullaney.

Solution

To streamline deployments of Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Assistus decided to take advantage of Microsoft Dynamics Sure Step after learning about it at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference. Sure Step covers six project stages: diagnostic, analysis, design, development, deployment, and operations—with phase-specific tests throughout. Each of these stages includes a range of documentation, which the company can use to capture key project information. Assistus can then save the entire project in Sure Step and use it repeatedly on similar future projects, helping the company to continually streamline its operations and reduce costs through economies of scale.

This methodology stems from the collective experience of Microsoft Services and many Microsoft partners from planning for and deploying Microsoft Dynamics solutions worldwide. Such experience was of particular importance to Mullaney. “With Sure Step, we get the combined experience from numerous implementations and a large group of consultants boiled down into a single methodology that we could adapt and use with our customers,” he notes.

Sure Step, and how it encourages users to get involved in the analysis and design phases, really leads to a high level of user adoption, which is usually the biggest obstacle. Ryan Mullaney, President and CEO, Assistus

Adopting Sure Step
Although adoption was not instant, Assistus was able to incrementally bring in more of the tools and documentation from Sure Step to every engagement to the point where it naturally became the company’s standard implementation strategy. “We initially used Sure Step to fill in the gaps where we lacked experience,” says Mullaney. “Then once we really started to understand and use it, we adopted it almost entirely.”

Once the company used Sure Step in every project, the flexibility enabled Assistus to make the methodology more practical and valuable by assimilating information from past customer engagements, such as custom code and process details, and by customizing documentation. “To help customers envision what they want out of Microsoft Dynamics CRM, we customized the solution design document from Sure Step to include screenshots,” says Mullaney. “As a result, we have seen an increase in adoption because our customers understand what they are getting up front and sign off on the design early on in the project.”

Engaging Customers
From the moment Mullaney meets with a prospective customer, Sure Step comes into play. “Sure Step is a means of reinforcement and gives us a sense of credibility when we first engage a customer because Microsoft approves and suggests using it,” says Mullaney. “It’s always a bad idea to approach a new customer, promise them what a new solution can do, and then not be able to validate it afterwards. What we can do with Sure Step is get the initial requirements, start a dialogue, and then refine so that we can be confident that the implementation team can deliver what we promised. For a salesperson, that’s a huge benefit. People are so much more confident when they know they can look a customer in the eye, make a promise, and deliver on it.”

Benefits

With Sure Step, Assistus has methodically planned and executed on projects with a high degree of success. Summarizes Mullaney, “By using Sure Step, we can be more accurate in our budget and time estimations,” says Mullaney. “Sure Step is not only helping us decrease the cost to customers but increasing our margins as well.”

Decrease Implementation Cost
Assistus uses Sure Step to decrease the costs of deploying Microsoft Dynamics CRM in a number of ways:

• Streamlined deployment. Explains Mullaney, “Because we have Sure Step in place, projects are now more streamlined and optimized for the individual customers. We know how long all the phases will take, and as a result, we can increase our in-house efficiency. One of the first projects we delivered without Sure Step was completed in 12 months—6 months late. Now, with Sure Step, we routinely deliver in less time than the projected timeline, and we can confidently tell the customer that the project will be delivered within budget and on time. By using Sure Step, we can now complete a complex implementation of Microsoft Dynamics CRM in only one or two months, a 60 percent reduction from projects before Sure Step,” says Mullaney.
• Economies of scale. Recently, Assistus took advantage of a Sure Step project template that included custom code for the calendaring of tasks for managing banquets and was able to reuse the project to reduce costs in a competitive bid. Says Mullaney, “We knew that this was going to be a cost-sensitive customer, but because we had a similar project and the custom code saved as a template from a past engagement, we didn’t have to spend two weeks programming. With Sure Step, we were able to reduce our costs by 10 percent.” The economies of scale at play with Sure Step are now beginning to change the way Assistus looks at projects overall. Consultants across the company now look for the commonality of components across projects to identify opportunities to reduce costs or increase margins.

With Sure Step, we get the combined experience from numerous implementations and a large group of consultants boiled down into a single methodology that we could adapt and use with our customers. Ryan Mullaney, President and CEO, Assistus

Reduce Project Risk
By taking advantage of Sure Step, Assistus is able to mitigate risk on new projects for both Assistus and its customers. Explains Mullaney, “One of the things I like about Sure Step is that it compensates for errors and omissions. If you were to meet with customers and ask what they want Microsoft Dynamics CRM to help them do, they will probably miss something or simply not know enough about the solution to say what they hope to accomplish with it. To reduce these risks, Sure Step gives us multiple opportunities to validate our solution design and requirements throughout the many stages of the project.”

Drive Customer Adoption and Satisfaction
Because Sure Step helps ensure close alignment between the solution and the initial customer requirements, Assistus has witnessed improvements in adoption by up to 30 percent from its customers, ultimately leading to higher customer satisfaction. “Sure Step, and how it encourages users to get involved in the analysis and design phases, really leads to a high level of user adoption, which is usually the biggest obstacle,” says Mullaney. “And the means that Sure Step uses, it’s actually the customers who do the majority of the design. It enables the customer to give us the design so that the project is clearly and always under their control.”

Microsoft Dynamics
Microsoft Dynamics is a line of integrated, adaptable business management solutions that enables you and your people to make business decisions with greater confidence. Microsoft Dynamics works like familiar Microsoft software such as Microsoft Office, which means less of a learning curve for your people, so they can get up and running quickly and focus on what’s most important. And because it is from Microsoft, it easily works with the systems that your company already has implemented. By automating and streamlining financial, customer relationship, and supply chain processes, Microsoft Dynamics brings together people, processes, and technologies, increasing the productivity and effectiveness of your business, and helping you drive business success.

For more information about Microsoft Dynamics, go to:
www.microsoft.com/dynamics

For More Information
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www.microsoft.com

For more information about Assistus products and services, call (888) 313-9398 or visit the Web site at:
www.assistus.com

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