Case Study - a charity membership system
I was asked to help update some reports in a membership system for a local charity. While not being of the same scale as most corporate systems, it did share a number of the challenges that I have also seen in large CRM implementations.
Poor data definition - most of the data was in the form of free text fields. Everything from phone numbers to titles were in free text. This inevitably led to poor data quality, with report designs assuming meaning in the data that simply wasn't there at field level. A manual data cleanse followed by structuring the field definitions correctly resolved this issue.
Lack of data relationships - this system treated couples (married, cohabiting or civil partnerships) differently from single people in a number of ways, the fee structure being the most significant. What was really needed were separate member tables, relationships between members and a rule set to figure out the fees. What they had one a single table, with multiple members in a single record. This wan't possible to fix in the time available, so we made do with a data cleanse and some documentation and training on how to manipulate the data to avoid most of the impact.
Lack of historical data - each time a payment was received, the payment field on the member record (one table, remember!) was overwritten. This meant that reports using the data, such as for tax reporting purposes, HAD to be run the day after the tax period closed. Unfortunately, some more enthusiastic members paid early, so their payments couldn't be matched to the applicable membership and tax periods. Again, the solution was to have a separate payments table, but no time or budget was available. The solution, once again, was in process and user training.
The conclusion of the analysis - was clearly that the system was not fit for purpose. You may have guessed by now that it was an Access databse written by an enthusiastic amateur. I recommended looking for an open-source or low-cost membership system as there were few requirements that were out of the ordinary in any way.
The exercise took less than three days from start to finish. Why not have me do the same for your Access databases, spreadsheets or other user-developed systems that have become mission-critical?
Additional information:
Talk to me! Call Ian Finlay on +44 (0) 7714 835897 or email at ian.finlay@theitdirector.com.
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