"When I was starting out as a project manager, I was assigned to implement a customer relationship management (CRM) tool for the company's marketing and sales teams. During the selection phase, leadership was wowed by this one tool because of how robust it was. Further, it was a very popular CRM used by our biggest competitors. The selection was done exclusively by the leadership team, with little representation from the people at sales and marketing who would become the end-users of the CRM. Leadership asked to do a 30-day trial, but there were no clear testing guidelines. It seemed like we just wanted to be on-trend with our competitors, but I was scared to play devil's advocate. In the end, we were paying 100% for a tool when we needed only 60% of its functionality.
After that project, I learned to contribute more in the initiation phase of a project. I think that if I had spoken out about my concerns, we could have taken a bit more time during the selection process and get a better understanding of the business needs. Now, when I get assigned a similar project, I always ask to do a thorough review of providers. I've also created a list of guidelines in which we take a lot of factors into consideration, not just organization-centric factors, but more importantly customer-centric ones."
