M AKING A S OFTWARE T RANSITION Jennifer Danic, President & CEO - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

MAKING A SOFTWARE TRANSITION

Jennifer Danic, President & CEO Steuben County Community Foundation Nicole Thompson, Vice President, Grants Management, Strategy & Analysis, Strada Education Network Stephen Borchers, Executive Director, Wayne County Community Foundation Amy Haacker, Executive Director, Blue River Community Foundation

5/30/2018

Communicate with Software Vendor

• Critical to understand where the lines are

drawn between licensing fees, conversion work, custom programming, and ongoing technical support.

• Knowing what the vendor offers as ongoing

support once live - changes can cost additional dollars

• Clear understanding between what are

standard fields vs customized and the cost associated

5/30/2018

Manage the Process

• Effective project manager, project plan,

realistic timeline

• Dedicate team - full time w/ various areas of

expertise

• Build flexibility into the timeline; don’t rush

the process

5/30/2018

Training/Testing

• Develop a training plan for staff
• Dedicate enough time and staff to create

detailed testing scenarios/scripts - focus on not only if the system works as expected, but try to blow up the system/cause it to fail

• Looking back, I wish we could have

scheduled extra, on-site training time to help make the transition.

5/30/2018

Internal Systems

• Ensure that you understand the system

supports your process, not the other way around

• Sometimes you have to just adopt a new

way of thinking rather, than trying to force the new system to support an existing way

• f thinking.

5/30/2018

Internal Systems – continued

• Understanding the capability of the new

software is important, but not as critical as

• process. In the end, it’s a matter of

understanding ‘how’ the system works and ‘how’ that will support your needs.

• Group meetings to hammer out fundamental

SOPs were painful, but necessary. Would have been helpful to have better understood ‘best practices’ before inventing our own wheel.

5/30/2018

External audiences (for web portals)

• In retrospect, we managed the transition to the online

application platform pretty well:

• Communicated with guidance counselors
• Started with just the LEI Community Scholars

application, later expanded to county-wide awards

• Held special meetings to show grant applicants how

to use the system. Offered individual help, if needed.

• Made clear our expectations of applicants
• Learned to communicate more and more frequently

especially with students using the system

5/30/2018

External audiences - continued

• We were unprepared for how many grant committee

and scholarship committee members chose this transition as a time to resign. We scrambled to recruit new volunteers. Had to start with Community Foundation basics before training them how to evaluate using the new software. If we did this again we would tell our volunteers sooner of the transition allowing more time to recruit new volunteers.

• Be sure to have a plan of how to handle a grant or

scholarship applicant who submits a grant or scholarship in the old format

5/30/2018

External audiences - continued

• Marketing the change to high school students and prior grantees

was easy. Marketing to nontraditional students (college students

• r adults) or nonprofits that had never applied for a grant before

turned out to be more difficult. We created a small ad-hoc committee to brainstorm ways we could reach out to this “unknown” population. We engaged our local library, EDC, WorkOne, and large employers to help.

• If using a software the public is relying on, be sure to check with

the software vendor about your “go live” date. Our “go live” date was conveniently the same day they did a patch that caused the system to be down for 12 hours. Had we called to confirm the date we would have pushed back a day or more. The public’s first impression of the software was a broken link – no fault of our own.

DETERMINING SOFTWARE OPTIONS

SLIDES FROM TRI-STATE COMMUNITY FOUNDATION FINANCE COURSE

DETERMINING SOFTWARE OPTIONS

Create a cross-functional team to conduct needs assessment

• Finance Department (include investment allocations, fee assessment)
• Development Department (include CRM, prospecting, event management, online

donor portal)

• Grants Management Department (include grants and scholarships, online portal)
• H.R. Software/Payroll

DETERMINING SOFTWARE OPTIONS

• All departments will probably not agree on the preferred package
• Determine how to pay for the initial investment & ongoing fees; Look at total

cost over 5-10 years

• Consider expertise of staff to run package & what effect key staff turnover

may have on implementation

• Budget for sufficient consulting fees to get package up an running
• Ability of package to integrate with other off the shelf software

PRIOR TO CHANGING SOFTWARE

• Data scrubbing & clean up
• Document business processes; new system provides opportunity to rethink
• Cross-functional project team to implement new software
• Consider timing of changeover
• Consider running dual systems for a period of time
• Gather lessons learned from the field

DETERMINING SOFTWARE OPTIONS

Create a cross-functional team to conduct needs assessment

• Finance Department (include investment allocations, fee assessment)
• Development Department (include CRM, prospecting, event management, online

donor portal)

• Grants Management Department (include grants and scholarships, online portal)
• H.R. Software/Payroll

DETERMINING SOFTWARE OPTIONS

• Determine if you need a fully integrated system
• Determine key must have functions/challenges with current package
• Demo various software vendors (provide them list of requirements to

address)

• Develop checklist comparing various packages & rate vendors as

appropriate

• Talk to actual vendor support about functionality, which may vary from what

salesperson presents

• Conduct reference checks

DETERMINING SOFTWARE OPTIONS

• All departments will probably not agree on the preferred package
• Determine how to pay for the initial investment & ongoing fees; Look at total

cost over 5-10 years

• Consider expertise of staff to run package & what effect key staff turnover

may have on implementation

• Budget for sufficient consulting fees to get package up an running
• Ability of package to integrate with other off the shelf software

PRIOR TO CHANGING SOFTWARE

• Data scrubbing & clean up
• Document business processes; new system provides opportunity to rethink
• Cross-functional project team to implement new software
• Consider timing of changeover
• Consider running dual systems for a period of time
• Gather lessons learned from the field