I’ve written many times about managing exceptions and being careful not to design rules around exceptions. As a general rule of thumb, if a given action occurs less than 10% of the time, it’s an exception, and should be treated as such. For example, one of the most common complaints I hear from my clients …
I was once working with a client during implementation of a new association management system. At one point we got into a lengthy discussion of how to use the database to automate, as much as possible, the collection of application information from a certain type of member. After discussing how we could use the software to …
Here’s a quick (under three minutes) video from me, via TMA Resources, on creating and executing exception reports.
A client of mine was telling me about a problem they have with fraudulent credit card charges, which require a bit of work on the behalf of accounting staff to fix. As we discussed the issue, it dawned on me to ask “How often does this happen?” The response: “Once every couple of months.” The …
I often tell my clients to avoid managing (or programming) to the exception. What I mean is too often when one or two members or customers complain about how we do something, we assume that we should accomodate their complaints and change our processes (or worse yet, reprogram the database to manage it). It's quite …
Some history IS important! When I’m advising clients on data conversion (moving data from one system to another) my advice is always the same: “Convert as little data as possible.” There is one big exception to this rule: volunteer and award history. Almost all volunteer history (and certainly all award history) should be kept, essentially …
Always look for the MVP I first wrote about minimum viable product (MVP) just three years ago, but the term itself was coined over 20 years ago. But I’ve been thinking about this more and more with all of my new projects, for one significant reason: Even compared to five years ago, much less 20 …
“Is this normal?” ne of the greatest parts about my job is that I get to work with so many different associations, which means I see all kinds of things that most of my clients never see. It also means I have a very deep perspective on how often something does or does not happen with associations …
Customer vs. staff In a properly designed AMS, when the customer goes online to your website to do business with you (e.g., join, renew, register for an event, buy a product), the website is interacting directly with the AMS. In other words, any data changes being made by the customer are going directly to the database …
Who is in control? Speaking with a client once about their database project, the client said something I found rather profound: “I want to feel like I control the database, not that the database is controlling me.” There’s a lot going on in that statement, and there are a lot of elements that affect whether …