You’re Live! Now What?!

You’re Live! Now What?!

For months, you’ve worked towards this moment: You’re live with your new Dynamics 365 system! It happened! It’s time to celebrate!! But…. now what? What happens now?

First of all, Congratulations!

Going live with a new Dynamics 365 system is an impressive feat. We know what went into that (blood, sweat and likely more than one moment of tears). Your users are logging in, recording data and management is pulling reports. You launched a great system but your role isn’t over just yet System Administrator! You get to inherit a new set of tasks and responsibilities:

Transitioning from Project Go Live to Continued Success

Post-go live, your role transitions from Project Management to someone who can think about a Dynamics 365 roadmap for your entire organization. Here are some goals you might have:

  • Encourage users to use Dynamics 365.
  • Get leadership buy-in.
  • Expand Dynamics 365 into new areas of your business.
  • Increase use cases of Dynamics 365.
  • Integrate disparate systems and create bi-directional syncs.
  • Launch marketing automations, drip campaigns, event management and plan webinars to increase user adoption within Dynamics 365.
  • Integrate your phone system, providing Customer Service Agents with screen pops for incoming and outgoing calls.
  • Implement Field Service, Project Service Automation, Business Central or other areas of Dynamics 365.
  • Add a Customer Self-Service Portal.

You will also inherit a new set of tasks and responsibilities that align with these goals. Here are just a few:

  • Continued expansion and enhancements to your Dynamics 365 system
  • Ongoing learning, training and new employee onboarding
  • Dashboards and reports
  • Data integrity
  • Future integrations

Continued Expansion & Enhancements

Obviously, your system will continue to mature, change and grow. As such, you should be armed with tools to make that easy. Check out these blogs designed to help System Administrators learn how to perform some standard system tasks. They offer great instructions to empower you to make these changes yourself.

Ongoing Learning, Training & New Employee Onboarding

Training shouldn’t end with your go live!

One of the keys to successful user adoption of Dynamics 365 systems at any organization is to provide ongoing learning. You could offer a weekly Lunch & Learn session (I did this when I worked at a Fortune 100 company as a CRM System Administrator.) I’d publish a topic and post a link to join a 30-minute webinar if someone was interested. It was a great success!

Also, make sure to have both training and new employee onboarding for Dynamics 365!

Dashboards & Reports

Management loves dashboards and reports (even ours. Nick loves graphs!) As your Dynamics 365 system matures, you’ll learn new metrics and KPIs that management and leadership may want to track. Continue to enhance existing dashboards and create new ones as needed. Depending on your organization, you can even consider Power BI, which is a great option to cull together multiple data sources into one streamlined dashboard that can be displayed within Dynamics 365.

Data Integrity

Most Go Lives lack perfect data integrity. And that’s OK – there are things you can (and should) do to enhance data integrity throughout the life of your Dynamics 365 system. Here are a few ideas:

  • Leverage out-of-the-box tools like Duplicate Detection Jobs, Data Merge, set your Duplicate Detection Settings and even consider Alternate Keys where appropriate.
  • Use Views to help identify data that needs to be fixed.
  • Consider Editable Grids for large quantities of data updates.
  • Consider 3rd party tools to help enhance data integrity.

Make your data integrity a priority! Perform monthly checks, hold semi-annual data reviews and host clean-up days. Hold your users accountable.

Future Integrations

Enhance your Dynamics 365 system by integrating it with other systems! Why would you integrate systems? Here are few reasons:

  • Eliminate multiple data entry points.
  • Reduce manual and repetitive tasks.
  • Increase efficiencies.
  • Streamline data and reporting.
  • Allow for seamless connections and real-time updates.

Sounds great, doesn’t it? Now, what can you integrate? Here are a few ideas:

  • ERP systems
  • Email and marketing automation systems
  • CMS
  • Chat and social media
  • Support desk tools
  • Telephony systems
  • Reporting and analytics (Power BI, Tableau or similar software)
  • Webinar systems
  • …. pretty much anything you want!

Need Help?

If you’re transitioning from your go live project to an ongoing system and need some help, feel free to reach out! We’re more than happy to help. You can fill out this Contact Form with details about what you’re working on, or email me directly at [email protected].

Heidi Neuhauser
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Heidi is a Partner at Reenhanced. She is a Microsoft MVP for Business Applications and is passionate about user adoption, out-of-the-box configuration tools, Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform.
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