You have worked with this amazing consulting firm that you heard nothing but praise about, you started strong and excited, made progress and spent months developing a beautiful software, then started seeing problems, each problem introduced you to another problem then it was downhill from there.
I will share with you the secrets of successful technology implementations, let’s go.
Clear End Goals / Objectives
Your goal is not to implement Salesforce, your goal is not to implement HubSpot, your goal is not to setup an amazing landing page, your goal is not the most beautiful site.
Thinking about technology usually drifts us away from our Business Goals. Remember that:
Business drives software, not the other way around
Remind yourself and the team of your goals throughout the implementation and ask this question at different milestones:
Are we on the right track towards achieving these goals?
Some example goals are:
More Donations/Revenue.
Spread Awareness about what we do.
Saving Time.
Current State vs Dream State
While Dream State may or may not be feasible, it is important to articulate where we are now and where we would love to be.
When traveling, we specify point A and point B, it would not make sense to say:
Please help me travel, I need a good travel, an improved travel, let’s do it.
Well, maybe some people would do that, that would not work in Software.
Both yourself and the provider will benefit from learning about
The Current State
Current Systems
Current Pain Points
Current Time Spent
Current Amounts of Donations
The Dream State
Less Time Spent
More processes automated
More Revenue
Better Analysis and clear data.
Reverse Engineering
Many developers and builders will start building right away thinking about the beginning and then move towards the destination, a better approach is to think about the destination and go backwards.
One of the early steps of a software implementation is a design phase, this is where we plan what we will do to achieve our defined goals. In this phase, it is important to start with the end goal and then think about that one step before that end goal, then what other steps do we need to take to get to that step and repeat.
Let’s take a scenario:
Objective
We want to increase our number of donations or amounts of donations.
Current State
We collect donations using a PayPal form on our website, we also learned that many of our supporters use different methods to pay online. We ran some surveys and spoke with some of our supporters and learned that it takes them a lot of time to fill this form. Running analysis on our website, we came to learn many donors drop halfway.
Future State
Would be lovely to make it easy and convenient for supporters to donate with whatever method they prefer.
Resolution
Knowing this information, we identified what problems to fix, and what features to look for.
More ways to donate
Online
SMS
In-Person
More Payment Methods
Card
Bank
Google Pay
Apple Pay
Venmo
Wire Transfer
Less questions on the form
See how we reverse engineer this; in order to increase revenue, we ran an analysis of the current situation and problems, upon identifying those problems, we came up with solutions to these problems, these solutions, tools and platforms will determine what to build.
Phased Approach
Never do 12-Month software implementation projects. What happens if you go live after one entire year to realize that it is missing this and that feature and it does not do this and that thing and it doesn’t meet our expectations and we keep asking where and how?!
Follow a Phased Approach instead, and always go for a Minimum Viable Product (MVP).
Go live after every phase, collect feedback, enhance and learn for future phases, repeat.
Let’s say you have the following areas at your Nonprofit:
Fundraising
Volunteer Management
Event Management
Program Management
Instead of building all 4 in a 12-Month Project, try to do 4 Projects instead, 3 months each, go live and repeat.
After every phase, we get to learn about the new software, what we could have done better, what went wrong and make those improvements into future phases.
If you are working with a provider, you want to know if they are doing a good job or a bad job early, and the best way to know is to use the software that they built for you as early as possible.
Even within each project, break it down into smaller milestones that either you can go live with or at least you get to try and experiment as early as possible.
How is your digital transformation journey coming along?
Have you experienced failed implementations before? What were the reasons behind those failures? How did you address or fix them?