Problem with Comments

Last Updated on Friday, 13 January 2006 03:39 Written by Steve Friday, 13 January 2006 03:39

I wasn’t getting any notifications of new comments, and I thought it was because there was no one commenting. Turns out, there was a couple week backup in the comment moderation queue. That’s cleared up, and I’ll work on the spam controls so I don’t have to moderate everything. If you feel the urge to comment, please do!

Real World Process Work: Two Cases

Last Updated on Wednesday, 11 January 2006 09:00 Written by Steve Wednesday, 11 January 2006 08:59

I went into my work with clients armed with a plan for helping them outline thier work processes. I’d listen to them tell me about what they do, I’d ask lots of clarifying questions along the way, and capture the process in a flowchart format. I wanted them to tell me how they work–I didn’t want to be leading the process.

With one of my first clients, this plan has worked great. They are an old-school conservation organization that knows exactly what they are doing and how they do it. They actually enjoyed telling me all their processes and identifying areas where they felt limited by technology. They loved the flowcharts and are totally digging the process stuff.

With one of my next clients, this didn’t work. They are a new group that has been doing this work for about a year. They don’t have a lot of process, but have gotten great work done in ad hoc manners. When I let them lead the walk through of the work they are doing, I got lots of pushback. They saw it as an inefficient process, and many of my granularity-seeking questions were met with comments like “I’ve already told you our process for this” or “we’ve only done this once, so we don’t have a process.”

It has become clear to me that process mapping of existing work is easier when people have been doing it for awhile, and are in a place to reflect on what is and is not working. When you ask someone who isn’t in this place about all their processes, they can feel a combination of being overwhelmed by the size of it, and being threatened because they haven’t had the time to think through things. Understandable, as the first few years of any nonprofit are a whirlwind of acitivity with very little time for reflection.

So, I’m trying to ask fewer questions with this new group, to be more respectful of where they are in their lifecycle. Their needs are simpler than the older client, so I should be able to get less granularity and still deliver the CRM they need. We’ll see!

New Salesforce.com version and Households

Last Updated on Tuesday, 10 January 2006 01:37 Written by Steve Tuesday, 10 January 2006 01:35

Householding is something that Salesforce.com hasn’t been good at. If you want to take donations from multiple people, and then thank them with one letter at the end of the year that aggregates all their donations, you had to go through some gyrations. The most comon gymnastic was to co-opt the Account object (usually meant to represent a company) and use it to represent a Household. This allows the report identified above, but has other consequences that have been a deal-breaker for me.

With the new Salesforce.com release, which came out this weekend, another workaround became possible. You can now relate a Household to an Opportunity. This allows you to record a $100 donation with Bob Horton as the donor and also relate it to his Household. Do the same thing with donations from Sue Horton, his wife, and then run the report that shows all Opportunites for a Household and you’ve got it.

To make this easy to use, there probably needs to be some custom code for creating Opportunities and automatically relating them to the right donor and Household. I’ve written part of this, and I’ll augment it to support the Household portion as soon as I can. Then I’ll tackle the non-trivial concept of thanking individuals vs. thanking Households, and the best way to do that.

Thanks to Salesforce.com for giving us more options!