The most common risk factors I’ve come across are:

• Availability of qualified resources
• Complexity of technical infrastructure and ensuring everything works
• Complexity of functional requirements and impact on customizations, particularly custom programming
• Third-party add-ons and utilities
• Data migration
• Systems integration

In the last project, two items ended up causing trouble.

The first was a third-party add-on that could not be installed correctly, or did not work 100% when it was installed. It took over two weeks and many hours of remote support sessions with the vendor, plus a patch to fix a bug, before it was working as expected.

The second was the technical infrastructure, particularly getting the outgoing e-mail to actually go out (solved by changing the SMTP settings), and getting the incoming e-mail to appear as activities in CRM (still a work in progress).

The lesson I learned? Identify as early as possible the risk factors and figure out how to mitigate those risks.

For example, don’t wait until the week before go live to install third-party add-ons, especially complex ones. Or if you think there is going to be a need for custom programming, then line up a programmer so they are ready when you need them.

Bottom line: Don’t sugarcoat the situation, and don’t make assumptions. Get into the details early and often, and you’ll be okay.