What Makes Nonprofit Tech Projects Succeed?
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Join Peter Mirus, a Build Consulting expert on technology project implementations at nonprofits, who will offer insights from his years of experience as a consultant, and answer participant questions on driving successful technology projects. What you'll learn: What does it mean for a project to be a "success?" What are the key elements your organization needs to have in place? What are the secrets of success that fail to get enough attention? How can you help your nonprofit be in the 50% of tech projects that succeed?
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What Makes Nonprofit Tech Projects Succeed?
- 1. WhatMakesNonprofitTechProjectSucceed? How to avoid being among the over 50% that fail.
- 2. Interact Ask questions via chat. Focus Avoid multitasking. You may just miss the best part of the presentation! Webinar Recording and Slides Links to the recording and slides will be shared after the webinar.
- 3. Invested Work exclusively with nonprofit organizations; have served over 1,000. Strategic Help our clients make IT and IS decisions that support mission. Collaborative Empower you to make informed choices.
- 5. Peter Mirus Partner, Build Consulting
- 7. Tomorrow’s best nonprofits will use technology to transform themselves... and the world.
- 8. More than 50% of nonprofit technology projects fail.
- 9. The technology moves forward... but the organization does not.
- 10. Build’s Information Strategy Framework Leadership and Governance DataOperations Process Technology TM
- 11. Transformation is critical to your success.
- 17. Changemanagement
- 18. Riskassessment
- 20. Supportivetools
- 23. Our Blog buildconsulting.com/blog Learning Resources buildconsulting.com/learning Newsletter buildconsulting.com/newsletter Formoreinformation…
- 26. Q&A
Editor's Notes
- Welcome to our webinar for May 2019, presented as a partnership between Build Consulting and Community IT Innovators. In this webinar, we’ll be discussing the keys to making your nonprofit’s technology project successful, and conversely, common pitfalls to avoid.
- Before we get started on the webinar, here are a few housekeeping notes….
- Now, a little bit about Community IT and Build Consulting. We both work exclusively with nonprofit organizations to help them make information technology and information system decisions that support their mission. We have a collaborative approach, empowering our clients to make informed choices for their organizations.
- Community IT is focused on providing outsourced network management, cyber security, and technical support services. Build Consulting leads in the social good sector by providing three types of services. We serve as part-time or in interim Chief Information Officers for nonprofits. We perform business process, technology, and data projects – ranging from strategic assessments and roadmaps to system selections and implementations. And we provide outsourced data managers with deep Development operations experience and nonprofit CRM expertise.
- My name is Peter Mirus, and I’m your presenter for this webinar.
- 20 years serving all manner of nonprofit organizations, ranging in size from small/local to enterprise/global, and across a wide variety of industry categories and mission orientations. Over the past 7 year, I’ve worked exclusively with nonprofit organizations. I’ve worked with over 100 clients in both the nonprofit, government, and for-profit spaces. I have three primary areas of expertise: marketing, constituent relationship management, and information strategy.
- Build’s analysis of industry statistics, combined with our observations of hundreds of organizations in the nonprofit sector, indicates the success rate for nonprofit technology projects is under 50%. Summaries of the relevant studies and their findings are available in one article on our website.
- Build Consulting’s experience is that most nonprofit technology projects fail because of other factors than technology. What do we mean by that? Simply that in today’s market, nonprofits have access to a broad range of quality technology solutions. There’s a good (or at the least, good enough) solution for the vast majority of needs. The challenge is often not the technology, but the fact that organizations do not first identify and make the organizational changes necessary to successfully select and implement new technology—or make significant improvements to the existing tech.
- No, the challenges are largely cultural, orienting around leadership and governance, operational capacity, business process, and data modeling—and then technology. That’s why Build Consulting formulated its Information Strategy Framework™ to help clients explore these considerations. (See also our whitepaper: Build An Information Strategy for Your Organization.) Yes, there are technological problems to be addressed, but as one study reported, “48.5% of executives said the problem was related to the people in the [organization], while 32% blamed processes, and 19.1% pointed the finger on technology.”
- Build defines success in a technology projects as “achieving the intended benefits”—not just in the short term, but for however long that intended benefit was to last. A project is a failure when it doesn’t realize the intended benefits. If yes, the project was a success. If not, the project was a failure. Example: If your organization implements a new CRM system for the primary purpose of increasing revenue, and revenue does increase, then it is considered a success. If it does not increase, the CRM project is considered a failure.
- I’m going to briefly talk about nine different keys to success: two regarding leadership, then six related to operations, and concluding with an extremely critical key to success that encompasses process, data, and technology. Following that, we should have plenty of time for questions!
- Executive sponsors should provide visible participation and regular communication. Assist with the prioritization of resources towards the effort, providing guidance and support, and ensuring accountability. Particularly for major projects that require extensive reallocation of staff time to complete successfully, actively engaged executive sponsors may by itself be the difference between being successful with the project, and not. We frequently see nonprofit organizations start with strong executive interaction in the project, but that attention wanes over time. There is a strong correlation between losing executive focus on the project and project performance setbacks. If you’d like to read more on executives can best support technology projects, see the extensive post in our blog written by one of our partners David Deal, a lead strategist at Build, as well as an experienced CEO, nonprofit CIO, and nonprofit board member. This post could be an effective tool for getting the right buy-in and engagement from senior execs, who are more likely to absorb this message from someone that has been at their level within an organization then they are to absorb the same message from a director, manager, or staff member at a lower organizational level.
- - Should be done as a collective effort, including all necessary stakeholders Agree what purposeful actions during implementation will ensure benefits are realized and sustained once the project ends. An example of a business benefit would be to achieve a 10% increase in sustaining members. Technology can help support this, particularly if it predicts which donors will become sustainers and helps automate the outreach campaign process. But technology alone will not address the issue. Purposeful actions during the implementation might include effective training of staff on how to use the features, and documenting new business processes to make sure they can be sustainably performed over time, including surviving potential employee turnover.
- Experience is key: choose someone to lead the project that has already successfully performed a similar project in a similar situation (organization/environment). Empowerment is critical: it is very difficult being an unempowered project director or manager, who stakeholders can feel free to ignore of disregard. One of the primary challenges of successful time management at nonprofit orgs is that employee time is often not budgeted or tracked for other projects, resulting in the behavior that all staff time is considered infinitely flexible. As a consequence of this, staff are often given new responsibilities associated with the technology project, and managers do not take anything off their staff’s plates so they have the time available to commit to the effort. This results in many projects underperforming or failing outright, as well as morale problems and increased turnover during lengthy projects.
- - Technology change always requires some sort of behavioral change. The practice of change management helps define the change that is coming, assesses its impact on the various roles within the organization, and help prepare those roles for the impact. Build Consulting has an change impact analysis “how to” tool and template in the Resources section of our website. Effective change management, incorporates leadership alignment, communications, training, and support. I’m currently working on a Salesforce Community-based client case management system that is being rolled to 10,000 volunteer mentors across over 300 chapters nationwide. In that scenario, leadership alignment includes not only the leadership at the national office, but also the regional vice presidents, district directors, and chapter leadership. Making sure those in leadership, at every level, are aligned to the business goals and performance metrics for the new system is critical. Communicating the phased timing of the roll-out as well as value propositions for the new system across the entire volunteership is critical. Training all expected users in the new system is of course highly important, as is planning for and delivering help desk support to all of the users. These things—leadership alignment, communications, training, and support--need to be taken into consideration for all technology projects from the early stages regardless of project size, but of course the level of change management capacity needs to be scaled to the size of the effort and will be at its greatest scale for the largest and most complex projects.
- Risk assessments are particularly necessary for large or complex projects. A good risk assessment assesses all of the potential challenges or “risks” for a project, including each one’s source, probability of occurring, and potential impact on project cost, schedule, or performance. It also introduces a mitigation or response plan for each risk. A risk assessment is not a “one and done proposition” – it must be revisited and updated to track the status of existing risks and to add new risks as they enter the picture. One example of a typical risk is lack of stakeholder availability to participate based on conflicting priorities or events. Depending on the degree, this risk could have a high impact on project cost, schedule, and performance. A good example of how to mitigate such a risk would be to take steps to make sure team members are freed from responsibilities that conflict with progress on the project.
- Studies show that organizations that take an open and collaborative approach, focused in incremental design and implementation processes, show greater potential for success. This is most commonly referred to as an “Agile” process. This style helps to keep all of the key stakeholders engaged throughout all the many critical decision and review/approval processes throughout a technology project, from the start of requirements discovery all the way through post-implementation phases. It also helps break down project complexities into bite-sized chunks. One warning is appropriate here: it is important that when an vendor is selected to help implement a software system—and that vendor uses an Agile approach—that the vendor has the ability to be flexible when working with an organization that has never (or never successfully) been through a true Agile process. Introducing an Agile approach to an organization unused to working in that style can be a major culture clash that can cause projects to get bogged down or collapse entirely. For Agile projects, for example, it is very important that stakeholders are frequently available to participate in design reviews and user testing—sometimes on a weekly basis. This also means committing the necessary time to make business decisions within accelerated timeframes, compared to what the organization is accustomed to. So applying Agile principles in a way that will truly work for each organization is very important.
- Successful projects most frequently create a digital project collaboration environment that manages and socializes critical information related to the project. We prefer Teamwork Projects to tools like Basecamp, Asana, or MS Project. But the key is to have a functional space that is universally adopted by all the key project participants, and in which folks can be on the same page in regards to milestones, tasks, agendas and notes, files, risks, links, and critical conversations – any information the project requires to be successful. The best way to make sure a tool like this remains in active use—with up-to-date information--throughout the entire project is to use the information in the system as a live point of reference within team meetings, and to drive performance reporting to stakeholders.
- Technology projects, particularly large and complex projects, often require team members inside the organization to step into roles for which they are not fully equipped. The most successful projects take this into consideration and take steps to make sure the team members are provided with the professional skills development they require to be successful in those roles. Special emphasis should be given to planning, communication, teamwork, time management, and change/adaptation skills. For one major project in which I am currently engaged, I have weekly professional development meetings with the Acting VP of Technology and the project coordinator, and ad hoc meetings towards the same purpose with other team members. The VP of Marketing and Strategy, who is the executive sponsor for the project, holds regular professional development meetings with other key project stakeholders. In this way, we collaborate to ensure that all team members have their heads-up when it comes to broadening their individual visions and equipping themselves with the perspective and skills they need to thrive in their project roles.
- Both business and technical requirements. Business requirement example: Ability to transfer a case record from one counselor to another within the same agency Technical requirement example: Full data encryption, both in transit and at rest, for all counselor, client, and case data Business and technical requirements should be carefully documented and prioritized. If the organization has a poor understanding of its current business processes and data, or processes are performed inconsistently, or data quality has been poorly managed, thorough business requirements can be very difficult to develop. Poor business requirements are one of the leading contributors to projects running over budget and over schedule, and are a leading cause of the wrong system being selected and implemented. One of the reasons Build Consulting prefers to get involved with client technology projects during the early assessment and roadmap phase is because when we first get involved at the implementation phase, it often becomes apparent that the organization will need to back up and do requirements definition in a more deep or thorough manner before they can have a successful implementation. And when a vendor is engaged and the implementation is already moving, it can be very difficult and costly for the organization to push the pause button. Software vendors frequently tell Build that our clients are better prepared to have successful software selections and implementations than any of their other nonprofit customers. It is common for us to hear feedback like “I’ve been working in this space for 15 years, and this is the best RFP we’ve ever received.” This is because our clients have already anticipated, wrestled with, and made important requirements decisions ahead of going into the selection and implementation efforts. This results in selecting software that matches the needs of the organization, and a much better mutual understanding between the nonprofit and the vendor about what it will take to successfully complete the projects – including a much more accurate projection of total cost.
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- Any experience with converting from Blackbaud products? Do they fight turning over the data from cloud-based apps? Yes, we do have a lot of experience with this. I wouldn’t characterize them as “fighting” to keep the data, but as with any vendor, the ease of getting data out of the system varies from product to product. ‘ll follow up via email with whomever asked this question to get more specifics so I can better answer the question. Best advice for non-technical managers/leaders in orgs to manage successful projects, especially if done by outside vendor. Get someone who knows both the business and technical landscapes, and who has successfully led similar projects in the past, to help lead and manage the project for your organization. This is one of the most important factors in success. Otherwise you will absorb greater risk though lacking the expertise and experience to successfully lead the project. How to be responsive to tech project constituents in the design/development process? How to keep constituents invested in project. The answers to this start with how you engage project constituents, which we call stakeholders, in requirements development, is furthered by leveraging an Agile approach in solution design and development or configuration, and how you perform change management before, during and after the roll-out. How to move an implementation from the early adopters to the whole organization Generally the answers to this are found in creating the change management plan, including a focus on how to manage leadership alignment, communications, training, and support across all waves of a roll-out. Sometime this includes leveraging early adopters to help convince other leaders to buy-in to the process, including their positive testimonials in communications, asking some of the early adopters to serve as trainers or mentors for later adopters, and making sure the early adopter feedback informs knowledge base resources such as FAQs and How To articles that can help lessen the burden on support staff to respond to incoming common questions and issues. We are moving a CRM database to new technology, what steps should I take? That depends on where you are in the process, but I would say to start by considering the five aspects of Information Strategy you saw at the start of this presentation, as well as the keys to success we’ve been discussing, and determine whether or not you have the internal skills, experience, time, and money to successfully undertake the effort. I’m happy to follow up via email! We need a new VMS YESTERDAY--our current one sucks. But it has data in it going back to the 90s. Is migration even possible? So much of this depends on what the database is on the back-end, and what the cost would be to extract the data, transform it to match the format needed for importing into the new system, and then load it into the new system. Happy to follow up via email. What are best practices for managing multiple projects at a time (using both agile and waterfall methodologies)? The best starting point I can recommend is to make sure you have the ability to manage project milestones and associated key “products” within each project and across all projects. By “products” I mean “what is supposed to have been produced or delivered by that point in the project.” This gives stakeholders at all levels the most critical birds-eye view of whether or not the project or projects are on schedule and producing what they were intended to produce. Having this as a common approach across all projects allows you greater liberty in how you manage tasks in ways that are best for each project and its participants. Teams across different projects, particularly if you have individual projects that are predominantly teamed by people from one functional area of the business, may have dramatically different work styles that are equally effective. You can see wildly different project task collaboration approaches between, for example, a Marketing team and an Accounting team, or between a Development team and a Program monitoring and Evaluation team