gokubi.com

Is to let a whole lot of smart people do most of the work…

In starting this program, I am leaning on bevy of great resources, many of which have been invaluable to me. I’ve gotten a lot of help from our peers, our customers, and our staff.

Outside of my company there is a community of smart people doing database consulting with the same kinds of customers we’re planning on serving. I’ve been grateful to learn from those smart people and their published materials. This summer, so many people responded kindly to my phone calls and emails for help. Thanks!

I was also really lucky that the timing of my hire lined up with AdvocacyDev II, a conference for developers who work in the nonprofit space. I got to be part of some great conversations about database consulting, constituent relationship management in the nonprofit world, and the database needs of advocacy activities. It was perfect timing for me, and a few times I felt like the conference had been set up just to help jumpstart my program!

Another key set of information has come from our customers. For many years they have been telling us about their database needs and woes. We’ve internalized those needs into our picture of general requirements of our customer base. We also rely heavily on great database contractors, and I’ve gotten a ton of info that they’ve passed on to staff.

And then the most important part from the standpoint of my sanity—my company really groks consulting with nonprofits. I get to drop a new program into a highly functional consulting framework—what a joy. The consultants here have things pretty tight and if I don’t thank them on a daily basis, I really should.

So, I took stock of everything I could find that was out there regarding database consulting. I spent a full two months doing research, digging through process documents, and tapping the brains of all these smart folks. And at the end I had a framework for a process on paper. A process that hadn’t been tested in the real world, but it was something.

Now girded with the lethal weapons of the consultant, the process and the framework, I was ready to embark on a perilous journey—taking the leap and choosing the software platform on which to base my consulting work.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 9th, 2005 at 10:37 am and is filed under CRM, Technology. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.