There once was a data person called Julie, who realised that moving a client’s DM selection to web view in Raiser’s Edge meant the loss of quick letters, which had previously been doing much of the heavy lifting. Julie scurried off into a corner, fighting back tears. That night she tossed and turned in bed, dreams of broken processes and lovingly crafted external databases left to wither. In the morning she donned her Big Data Pants and decided there had been enough moping around and she had to embrace the change. What would that look like? How would it work?
This isn’t really a story about moving to Raiser’s Edge web view. That’s going to be a bind and not everything will move over, but change we must. The real story is the bit you can’t see.
Originally, I thought I was swapping over some queries, making sure all the merges worked, checking quick letters produced the same outputs and then using the leftover time to tidy up my external Access database. But the realisation that quick letters doesn’t exist in web view forced me to stop and rethink the whole selection process.
My hand had been forced.
And it turned out to be a good thing.
I might not have thought so at the time, when deciding it was easier to have an existential crisis than rethink something I’d spent three years building. So I started again at the beginning and asked a different question:
What am I actually trying to achieve?
I’ve kept a clear division. Raiser’s Edge contains the individual segment queries so if something happens to me, the client still has something understandable and usable.
The external process now does what external processes should do – streamline the hierarchy and handle the additional data management needed to make the output presentable (mailable!). I’ve even added some VBA so the whole thing runs in one click instead of needing each step individually.
And this is the bit that caught me out.
I spend a lot of time helping organisations challenge inherited processes and think differently about their tools. Turns out I’m just as susceptible as everyone else. I was trying to preserve the process because I had the tool. What I should have been doing was designing the tool around the process I actually needed.
Sometimes constraints don’t make things worse. Sometimes they force you to build something better.
I’ve got some space over the coming months to help teams simplify processes, redesign workflows and stop carrying forward workarounds that no longer earn their place.
And if you know a team wrestling with systems, processes or inherited ways of working – I’d really appreciate an introduction.
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