Ask Slashdot: How Would You Convince Someone To Give Up an Old System? 379
First time accepted submitter Vanderhoth writes "I'm currently serving as a new member of a board for a not for profit organization. The board currently has a few other members, and a couple of vacant positions. One of the issues I've noticed since joining the board is the method in which they conduct business is very out of date. The member that maintains our web presences (Bob) has developed a system over the last ten years to allow us to store documents, such as agendas and minutes on a website server.
Some of the big issues are:
1.) The system is very disorganized, there are documents from the late 90's that aren't relevant, but have to be sifted through to find more current stuff.
2.) Often documents are not where they should be and are difficult to find.
3.) No one except Bob really knows how the system works.
4.) No one really wants to use the system because of the monster it's become.
My concern is if Bob decided to leave the organization no one would be able to maintain the existing system and we would be scrambling to put something new in place. I feel, for what we want to do, Google Docs would be an excellent platform for collaborating and sharing documents. The other board members, except Bob, have agreed with me, but are worried that bringing the issues with the existing system may cause offense and ultimately cause Bob to leave. Other than being overly vested in a system he developed, Bob is an important part of our board and a very valuable member.
We're already having a difficult time finding members to serve on the board so it's very important that we don't lose any existing board members. I'm hoping that I can convince the Bob to start supporting some Google docs objects on the site and try to wean him off his existing system to something a bit more manageable and collaborative that can be passed on to new members and maintained easily.
I don't want this to turn into old dogs and new tricks. I'm not that far behind Bob in years and can appreciate the difficulty of being told it's time to give in to something more modern. I'm wondering how the situation could be approached tactfully so maybe Bob will see how much easier a new system could be for everyone, including him."
Some of the big issues are:
1.) The system is very disorganized, there are documents from the late 90's that aren't relevant, but have to be sifted through to find more current stuff.
2.) Often documents are not where they should be and are difficult to find.
3.) No one except Bob really knows how the system works.
4.) No one really wants to use the system because of the monster it's become.
My concern is if Bob decided to leave the organization no one would be able to maintain the existing system and we would be scrambling to put something new in place. I feel, for what we want to do, Google Docs would be an excellent platform for collaborating and sharing documents. The other board members, except Bob, have agreed with me, but are worried that bringing the issues with the existing system may cause offense and ultimately cause Bob to leave. Other than being overly vested in a system he developed, Bob is an important part of our board and a very valuable member.
We're already having a difficult time finding members to serve on the board so it's very important that we don't lose any existing board members. I'm hoping that I can convince the Bob to start supporting some Google docs objects on the site and try to wean him off his existing system to something a bit more manageable and collaborative that can be passed on to new members and maintained easily.
I don't want this to turn into old dogs and new tricks. I'm not that far behind Bob in years and can appreciate the difficulty of being told it's time to give in to something more modern. I'm wondering how the situation could be approached tactfully so maybe Bob will see how much easier a new system could be for everyone, including him."
Tell him (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Smart Guy (Score:5, Informative)
Sounds like Bob has found a way to ensure his continued employment and everyone around is too spineless to play that game of chicken with him.
"member of a board for a not for profit organization."
"Not for Profit" does not always mean "unpaid volunteer", and that includes the board.
Re:Smart Guy (Score:5, Informative)
My girlfriend had a job at a charity whose President made $500k+ per year. Working for a 503(c) can be very, very lucrative.
Re:Smart Guy (Score:5, Informative)
No, boards and employees of non-profits are often paid, and some are paid quite well (e.g. museum boards, well known fund-raising organizations). All a non-profit means is that they can't return a profit to investors, as their goal is social rather than financial.
That being said, most non-profits are small organizations run entirely with unpaid volunteers. And that's great, of course. But pretty much any non-profit that is big enough that you can name them has full-time paid staff running them, even if most of the workers are unpaid volunteers, because it's worth it to have a degree of continuity and professionalism that you can't usually get from volunteers.
For example, this report (yay Google) has survey data of non-profits: http://www.asaecenter.org/Resources/whitepaperdetail.cfm?ItemNumber=22981 [asaecenter.org] /
Re:Bob IS ANGRY (Score:5, Informative)
THIS.
I was once maintaining a small political organizations website.
OK my system (few hundred lines of perl, run offline) *was* minimalistic.
OK my system did not have many features
BUT my system did what was needed (define a navigation structure,insert ~100 text documents at the right place), my system froduce blazingly fast static webpages, delivered in a zip file, which ran on every client device and every webhoster. And my system was definitely low-maintainance (since there existen NO dependencies at all).
Content was missing. People did not just mail me content (as i asked for). People did not just ask how to update the website. Content was outdated. *The ironic part is* as the guilty party for not updating (largely) static content my quite simple system was identified, which (seen from behind seems a little ironic).
So some fucking greenhorn arrived (i was happily handing this over to him, since i had a lack of time) and decided that he
a) does not understand enough perl to do this (he did not talk to me a single time)
b) content which was completely static needed PHP - because that was the only thing he knew
c) Taking an off the shelf CMS to magically solve all problems
Reality check:
a) The transition to the new web hoster (providing PHP) took so much time that the next election was nearly there before the website worked again
b) The website did not contain more content, it did not even contain the old ported content. People who were not able to send mail before did not produce content afterwards (did i mention that he had problem to configure user access to the CMS)
c) The guy left shortly later without a transition plan
d) After that the website was scrapped again and set up by a professional web designer (which was payed for setting it up but not for maintainance). The website still had not more content than my first version
Lessons learned:
* If there is a running system and people complain about outdated content, changing the system along wont change much. The people conplaining loudest are usually the ones who write complain-emails instead of sending the fuckign article (or even just a decent self-intro) you ask them for 2 months. *Ignore them*
* Running a website without getting payed has even worse ressource constraints than other websites. Every change of the underlying system is a ressource hog (oh yeah, you sure expect Bob to copy the few hundre documents in his spare time to google docs. You did the heavy lifting of settign up the google account)
* Never ever touch a running system
Re:Step back, Stop, and Re-Assess (Score:5, Informative)
What rueger said.
I've been there before as a new board member of a non-profit, and rueger is completely correct that it takes at least a year to understand how an organization works and why things are the way they are. More importantly in your case, it takes that long to suss out the nature of the personalities involved, and know what is important or not to each director so that you know how best to advance your goals and make it a positive thing for everyone involved, but most importantly the organization itself.
More than any of that though, you really need to study what the appropriate and necessary roles of a director are. Start Googling and reading on the subject -- there's lots of good stuff out there. As a director you are entrusted with serious legal responsibility for governance and oversight of the organization and accomplishing its stated mission. Everything you do must serve those ends and must be evaluated in light of them. This is your primary role and duty -- everything else is secondary.
Your legal duty and responsibility is to the organization. Not to the board. Certainly not to Bob. So first you need to identify how the current situation is holding back the board from any or all of its responsibilities for governance, oversight, or accomplishing the organization's mission. Once you understand that you can use it as a basis of a discussion with the board so that the board can decide whether they want to solve the problem. If they decide as an entire board through an adopted motion that they want to solve the problem, then you can work with the stakeholders such as Bob to figure out the "how" part of solving the problem (unless Bob already agrees that it needs fixing, in which case the two of you may be able to work together to approach the board together with a presentation of the problem and a proposed solution). See how that works? Identify the core duty/responsibility, address the problem in achieving that duty/responsibility, determine a course of action through the board's official decisions, then implement that decision while maneuvering in the zone of the personalities involved.
How does this then apply to your situation? In order for the board to perform its oversight and governance functions, as well as preserve business continuity in achieving it's mission, it is important that they have reliable access to all documents which they need. The degree to which it is easy to locate those documents impacts how effective the board members can be at carrying out those duties. And for the important documents reuger mentioned (minutes, budgets, etc), it is extremely critical to have a solid paper trail, particularly if for some reason your secretary of state, the IRS, or J. Random Attorney With Aggrieved Client comes knocking. Maintaining these records is part of your legal "duty of care", and you need to make sure it is done, and done wetech.slashdot.orgt SuperBanana mentioned further above: Once you've identified the weakness that your board is responsible for fixing, operate within the correct procedures of the board to address the issue. Get the item on the agenda. Let Bob present on how he would like to fix it, or have the board discuss how they would like it fixed. As part of this the board should create and vote on motions that direct the next steps that should be taken (e.g. further research, funding for implementing a solution, etc). At this point it doesn't matter any longer if Bob is on board with the approved motions or not -- though hopefully he is and a plan that he's happy with has been adopted. In any case at this point the board's decision is as good as law for the organization: if any director cannot faithfully support and help execute the adopted motion, whether or not they were in favor of the motion in the first place, that director needs to resign. If the director works to undermine the board's decision and doesn't resign, the board needs to remove them post-haste.
This doesn't have to be as heartless in practice as it sounds
Re:Bob's value (Score:0, Informative)
It can be translated as: "I am HUGELY smug. And let me spread my smugness around so everyone can see how glorious I am."
Re:Smart Guy (Score:4, Informative)
Just to clear things up, my group is unpaid. Bob does all the work for us because he want's to support the group not because he's getting a pay check for it.
Re:What about Bob? (Score:4, Informative)
I plan on talking with Bob about his system and asking him to give me the tour, since one of the biggest complaints of the other board members is that no one would be able to maintain the system if/when Bob decides he has other things to do and doesn't have enough time to volunteer. It seems many posters took my request for suggestions as I'm a young whipper snapper trying to do away with the old guy. That's not the case. I like Bob and think he's brilliant, it's just everyone shudders when they have to go looking for something and it seems only Bob can create/sort/retrieve documents from his system. So if he leaves tomorrow we have no way of getting documents out of his system and into something we can access them from.
We're not paid for our time on the board and don't work together. We don't really even live or work close together and only meet face-to-face a few times a year so the system has to be something we can all access from anywhere, which is why I was suggesting Google Docs, but I'm open to other suggestions. Even learning Bob's system and helping to improve it to make it more manageable for the other board members.