Everyone in IT project management has been burned by a project. A project that overran, a partner who became less responsive once the contract was signed, a series of “we’ll sort its” that never got sorted. That experience is never pleasant.
So if you’re weighing up a Dynamics 365 CE partner at the moment, here are five questions worth asking before anything gets signed.
What’s the total cost, not just the licence fee? Licensing is the easy number to quote, and the easiest to compare between partners. However, it’s rarely where the real spend ends up. Cleaning and migrating data out of your old CRM or spreadsheets almost always takes longer than expected. Third-party add-ons for things like e-signature or document generation aren’t included in the core licence. Sandbox environments for testing cost extra too. And Copilot or Power Automate usage has a habit of creeping up once people realise how good they are. These items are easy to leave out of an early estimate, so ask for them upfront.
Will the same people who scope it actually deliver it? Ask this one directly. A lot of the pain in tech projects comes from a handover between sales and delivery, where the person who understood your business disappears once the ink dries.
What happens when the scope changes? Because it will. Dynamics 365 CE scope has a habit of growing gradually. Discovery often turns up legacy processes that don’t map neatly onto the standard entities. Messy or duplicate data can surface things that need sorting before go-live. And once people see what the platform can do, requests for “just one more automation” tend to follow. That doesn’t mean that the project’s gone wrong, it just means that it’s running normally. What matters is that your partner flags it as it happens, rather than it turning up later as a surprise invoice.
Who’s accountable when something goes wrong? A proper answer to this names a person, a procedure and a next step. With D365 CE, this matters more than it sounds. The team who build and configure your system often isn’t the same team who picks up support once you’ve gone live, especially if a partner brings in a separate helpdesk or offshore resource for day-to-day issues. Ask what happens when something breaks after go-live: who deals with it, how quickly and whether it’s the people who actually understand your setup. It’s also worth asking how they handle problems that turn out to be their mistake, perhaps a bit of configuration that wasn’t quite right, rather than something you did or a Microsoft update. The answer tells you a lot about how they’ll treat you once the contract’s signed.
Tell me about a project that didn’t go entirely to plan. Every partner has one. The ones worth working with will tell you honestly, and tell you what changed as a result.
If it’d help to talk through your own project against this list, we’re happy to do that. Half an hour, no pitch, just a look at where you’re at right now.
