Composite, drawn from patterns across engagements, not one specific client.
"Simple CRM migration" was the description going in, move data from one system to a better one. It turned into a two-month process audit, because moving the data honestly required first answering a question the business had never actually settled: what does a "lead" mean, exactly, at each stage.
Why a data move became a process problem
The old CRM had accumulated five different, informal definitions of a "qualified lead," one per sales rep, none written down, all technically different. Migrating cleanly meant picking one definition and moving everything against it, which meant the migration couldn't proceed until the business made a decision it had been quietly avoiding for years: what actually counts as qualified.
What surfaced once that question got asked directly
Two reps were counting cold inbound form fills as qualified leads. One was only counting leads after a live call. The sales numbers each had been reporting up were never actually measuring the same thing, and had not been for a long time. Nobody had lied, everyone had just filled a gap in undefined territory with their own reasonable interpretation.
What the "migration" actually delivered
A single, written definition, a corrected view of what the pipeline numbers had actually meant for the past two years, and a CRM that finally enforced one consistent standard instead of five invisible ones. The software move was almost incidental to the real value delivered.
The lesson, generalized
A tooling project is often the forcing function that surfaces a process gap that's been sitting quietly for years, tolerated because nobody had a reason to look closely. The tool migration isn't usually the hard part. The cleanup it forces, agreeing on what each term means, almost always is, and it's almost always worth more than the tool itself.