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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!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 11th, 2006 at 8:59 am and is filed under CRM, Technology. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.