Who should own CRM administration?

• Field, layout, and picklist changes as the process evolves.
• User provisioning, roles, and permission requests.
• Report and dashboard changes, including retiring ones nobody uses.
• Rule edits, and the occasional import or data cleanup.
• Answering "why did this record do that" questions, which is the part that requires knowing the history.

The last item is why administration is not interchangeable with any available pair of hands. Diagnosing unexpected behaviour depends on knowing what was changed and why, which is a memory the account either has in writing or does not have at all.

• Internal administrator. Fits where volume is steady and there is someone with the skills and the time. The risk is that the role gets absorbed into another job, and admin work happens in the gaps.
• External agreed scope. Fits where the business needs configuration work but not a full-time role, or where nobody internally wants to hold admin permissions. The scope has to be written in categories, with a cadence and a log.
• Split. Fits where day-to-day user requests sit internally and structural changes sit outside. This needs the boundary written down, or requests bounce between the two indefinitely.

1. The scope: which categories of work are covered, and which are not.
2. The cadence: how often work is picked up, and how urgent requests are handled.
3. Who holds which permissions, and what happens when someone leaves.
4. The change log: what changed, when, and why. This is the artefact that makes the account explainable.
5. The review point: when the scope is looked at again, because volume changes.

• Requests arrive through chat and disappear, with no record of whether they were done.
• Nobody can say when a field or rule last changed, or who asked for it.
• The same request is made repeatedly because the first fix did not hold.
• Only one person knows how the account is configured, and there is no written record.
• Structural changes keep being deferred because the queue of small requests never empties.

The example below is hypothetical and describes a pattern rather than a client account.

Ongoing administration is the fourth of the CRM consulting scopes, part of the Operations & Systems capability. Where the account's problems are adoption rather than configuration, the training and adoption scope is the better starting point.