Wes’s Wednesday Wisdom

Simple and Faster is Better Earlier this week I was fortunate enough to attend a session at ASAE’s Annual Meeting entitled “No Analyst, No Problem!” presented by Bailey Kasten and Meagan Roloff. Their session was essentially about creating data visualizations on a shoestring budget. They presented several “case studies” of how they took relatively complex […]

Patience and grace A past client of mine recently told me: “You inspire confidence and calmness which people need when going through an AMS transition.” This got me thinking about two behavioral attributes that I think are absolutely critical to success when going through any major technology transition: patience and grace. Technology transitions, no matter

Sometimes you just have to try it and see what happens The single greatest key to happiness in data management (and life!) is to seek success and not perfection. A corollary to that could be “Try it and see what happens.” Part of my work with clients is helping them make decisions about business rules and business

Training and testing I’ve written before that the best form of training follows this process: Tell them what you’re going to do, tell them what you’re doing, tell them what you did. When working with your software company to report bugs or other issues, you should follow a similar process: Tell them what you were

How to save a “failing” project It is not unusual for me to receive a call from an association that sounds something like this: “We implemented a new AMS in the past year, everyone on staff hates the new system, and this whole project is failing. What can we do to save it?” While every project

How to avoid the “IT black hole” Going all the way back to my days as an association staffer (more than 30 years ago) I’ve encountered what I call the “IT black hole.” The IT black hole is where technology issues go to die. Perhaps you’ve experienced this. You report an issue to your technology staff

The “People” are important! I’ve written a lot about people, process, and technology over the years. This is the three-legged stool of success for any technology project (and these days, for any project at all!). My writing has focused mostly on process and technology because process and technology are usually easier to change. But I

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

The longer you take, the longer it will take It may sound like a tautology, but the longer you take to complete a project, the longer it’s going to take to complete it. Put another way, every day you add to the final launch of the project increases the odds that you’ll add even more

Data is for action When deciding whether or not to collect a piece of data, there is a simple question that will help you decide: “What action will I take on this data, either immediately or in the long-term?” If you can’t answer that question clearly, then you don’t need to collect that data. (Note: