The rub is that these requirements need to be quite detailed indeed.

Detailed requirements are written down, and software developers group them by complexity and ascribe a level of effort for each function. Ideally, you could examine the features of the solution and map them to your requirements, highlighting gaps where new features would be needed.Ī second approach, and perhaps the most classical approach for custom application development, is function point analysis. The question to ask is whether your requirements will be different from other clients. For instance, my company InfoStrat implemented a Dynamics CRM solution called Stimulus360 for about 19 clients, so by the time the third or fourth client approached us, we had a pretty solid idea of the cost elements and the variables in order to estimate the project.

If a similar solution has already been implemented, this can be the shortest path to an estimate. If you choose cloud or hosted as your deployment model, the hardware and software licensing is usually included in your monthly hosting fees.Īfter you nail down the hardware and software, the more challenging part is estimating the cost of professional services. Microsoft offers external connector licenses for users outside your domain in lieu of user licenses. Software licensing is driven by the number of server and user licenses which are required for your solution. Enterprise solutions usually call for development, test, and production environments (and sometimes a staging environment). Don’t forget to include all the environments that will be needed. For hardware, many organizations use standard server configurations, so costs are easy to determine. You can start with the easier items to estimate, the hardware and software. If you want more features, the cost will increase. In all these approaches, the traditional trade-off triangle among time, cost, and features still applies. There are several approaches to project estimation which can produce results with a high degree of accuracy. My most common answer, “it depends,” is not satisfying for them or for me, so I am going to explore this topic in depth and offer an approach for estimating implementations of Dynamics CRM, especially the xRM approach which involves using CRM as a development platform for a line of business solution. One of the questions I am asked most frequently by clients is to estimate the cost of a software implementation project.

One of the challenges is to calculate the cost of such an implementation. Many government agencies are using Microsoft Dynamics CRM to build line of business solutions using an approach that Microsoft calls xRM.

Microsoft dynamics implementation cost