Project Context
Northstar Health is migrating its sales and support teams from a legacy CRM to Salesforce to unify customer data, improve reporting, and retire two costly internal tools. You are the program manager leading a 12-person cross-functional team with a hard 16-week deadline because the legacy CRM contract expires on September 30.
The project matters because leadership expects the migration to reduce annual operating costs by $420K and improve lead-to-close reporting before Q4 planning. The team includes 5 engineers, 2 Salesforce admins, 1 data analyst, 1 QA lead, 1 security engineer, 1 change manager, and you.
Key Stakeholders
The CFO wants the project completed within the approved budget and is skeptical of change requests. The VP of Sales wants all sales workflows, dashboards, and mobile features available at launch. The Head of Support needs case history migrated accurately and will not accept data loss. The Engineering Director is concerned about team capacity because two engineers are also supporting a revenue-critical pricing system.
Constraints
- Approved project budget: $480,000
- Current forecast: $545,000 due to higher vendor migration fees and added dashboard requests
- Deadline: 16 weeks, no extension because the legacy contract ends
- Data volume: 2.4 million customer records and 6 years of case history
- External dependency: Salesforce implementation partner available only 20 hours/week after Week 6
Complications
- The implementation partner discovered legacy data quality issues that may add $40,000 and 2 weeks if fully remediated before migration.
- The VP of Sales has asked for 14 custom dashboards not included in the original scope.
- Security review now requires audit logging for admin actions, adding unplanned work.
Deliverables
- Build a budget management plan showing how you would track spend weekly and control variance.
- Recommend scope trade-offs to bring the project back within budget without missing the deadline.
- Present a stakeholder communication plan for budget decisions and escalation points.
- Define the launch plan, including what ships at go-live versus post-launch.
- Identify the top execution risks and your mitigation approach.
