I am coming to you with a common problem. I work for a national charity in Ireland. And, I am Ops Manager for the charity overseeing a care line with a team of ten call agents.
I have managed projects before. And, I never trained formally, but I worked in a lot of project teams and then at my last role in fundraising, I ended up managing all our internal projects and mini projects. And I did well. If I got anything right, it was always keeping everyone going when things got tough and getting projects finished.
Old Support Management System
In my current role I feel like I have been hammering my head against a brick wall for about two years now. We have a very old supporter management system supplied by a single developer who is a friend of the charityโs CEO (Of course, this situation has red flags everywhere).
The system was pretty good way back when. But ever since I have been here, it has never lived up to what we need. We have lots of downtime to fix problems. We have seen some scary things happen like data disappearing from backup only to reappear rather than be definitively retrieved.
Our staff hates the system, and it is not a question of this supplier developer guy being a problem. He has his hands tied. He wants to innovate yet in quiet corners he admits he has built something on very old software applications that are out of date. There is no big upgrade project he can deliver โ it canโt be fixed with tinkering.
But my real problem is that our management team is asleep at the wheel on this problem. I wrote a draft Business Case in my first six months, sharing options for budgets, suppliers, and software all well within our reach for investment. And on our quarterly development reporting today, that Business Case is STILL marked as Under Review. Eighteen months later!!!
At first, I hit some real pushback from the CEO. Even though I bought in our current supplier, telling him the change would involve him, my CEO saw this as a takeover bid and (secretly) a way to give him a headache on a personal front. So, the Business Case got sent away with some non-committal feedback and a very vague return date.
Rebuilding The Business Case
I did the genuine work of rebuilding the Business Case. The next time the Case went up, I got some agreement to โresearchโ much to the CEOโs distaste. But when I went back to management with the research for what I thought was going to be a budget decision and an approval to run the project, it got put on pause and we got into some wider income issues with dropping supporter numbers.
But about three months ago, our entire support teams were up in arms after six full weeks of small yet recurring performance issues. This time, my boss, the Head of Operations and Fundraising suggested I attach the document to my latest Business Case for review by the management team.
Once again that review sent me back for more research, this time suggesting we seriously look at some way to locate a โlike-for-likeโ switch to what we have now (impossible) with a budget that is much less than I outlined.
If I am honest given this mandate, I have zero energy or enthusiasm to go again and seek approval. I just cannot see it getting a green light and especially not in the way the Exec is suggesting.
Dismayed in Dublin
One Response
Great advice, thanks so much!