First Results

Last week we shared our preliminary baseline assessment findings with one of our key stakeholders who is also the director of a major Business Development Unit (BDU) within the institution. We were not expecting to see any impact from this report so quickly, but it seems like CRM is gaining support and interest is snowballing!

An email circulated yesterday across several other BDUs raised the importance of CRM and requested people use the CRM system for recording their BCE activities in the future. This has already resulted in enquiries regarding CRM system training and licence purchasing. A combination of awareness raising and support from management seems to have caused a major shift from months of discussing and debating CRM to proactive engagement.

In addition, we are going ahead with an initial idea sparked by our conversation with Sharon to host a networking workshop for our colleagues within the institution in order to raise the awareness of CRM. Has anyone done anything similar? Could you possibly advise us on anything you have found useful when hosting/promoting such an event? For example, how to raise interest in the event, especially with academic colleagues?

New Ways

It has been a very busy couple of weeks. Our first report should be available quite soon. In addition, we had a very useful telephone conference with Sharon Perry, who has kindly advised us among other things on a very good method of starting up our next Work Package.

In order to understand and develop the institution-wide requirements for CRM, we are now considering hosting a short event for our stakeholders on the topic of CRM. We intend to give short presentation about the project, but the main idea of the event will be more about bringing together colleagues from different departments who shares a common interest in CRM.

We are hoping that such an approach will help us to draft out the questions that we would like to include in our User Requirement Survey as well as to understand and establish contacts with new stakeholders and CRM champions outside the initially identified departments.

First steps

To begin with, I would like to introduce myself. My name is Vladimir Kislicins and I started with the University of Hull as a CaRM Project Officer at the end of August, 2009.

Although it is still early days, there already are some results we can share. First of all, we have developed a website dedicated to the project which is accessible through the following link:

http://www2.hull.ac.uk/ACS/information_management/carm_project.aspx

We will use the website for posting documents of our findings and overall progress. We have already developed a detailed project plan which is accessible for everyone to see via the website. There is also a link to the report on the first part of our Work Package 2 which is not active at the moment, but should be uploaded within the next week, after the report is finalised.

We will continue to update our blog as we reach some interesting results or significant problems. Feel free to check our website to view the project plan and other files that we would like to share.

It would be also very interesting to hear how other projects out there are doing as it has been some time since there were any updates!