Part of my job is to conduct interviews of database users. Another part of my job is to sit in with my client on interviews being conducted by vendors when they are gathering user requirements for a new system. One thing that has struck me in these meetings is that not many people have very good listening skills.

What I have observed is when two parties are talking, too often the party that is not talking is trying to anticipate what the other party is saying, rather than really listening to hear what is being said. One technique I use is to try to re-phrase what the speaker has just said, in my own words, to make sure I've heard what they're saying. (I believe it's referred to as reflective listening.) For example:

Client: When we go to meetings, we have several people checking in attendees. They all work off of different sheets. When we come back to the office after the meeting, it's very difficult to mark all of those who attended because there are five or six different sign-in sheets.

Me: So you're saying what you need is the ability to easily mark who has attended a given meeting in the system, after the meeting has finished. Is that correct?

If I'm right, the client says so. If I'm not, they correct me. But either way, we're getting closer to what they want, rather than me trying to guess at what they want.

So whether it's a meeting about your database, a staffing issue, or trying to decide what to do for dinner, practice reflective listening. You'll be amazed at how much easier conversations become when one side listens while the other side talks.

Associations spend a lot of time and money on training (or at least they should). But I wonder if any associations test for comprehension following training? And what about three-month or six-month "check-ins" to see if the training has "stuck"? Do you provide a venue for trainees to provide feedback about the training?

Training is one of those items that is so easy to cut from the budget, yet so incredibly important for long-term success of your data management system. And even if you do invest in training, how do you know if you're getting your money's worth? I'd recommend that as part of your training program you develop a structured feedback mechanism for attendees to ensure that your stated learning objectives have been accomplished. Otherwise you really have no idea if your training is working or not.

Let me start by saying I love the guys (and women) in IT. I really do. They are important to our success, and I can tell you many, many stories about how, as my father would put it, they “pulled my bacon out of the fire.” (Here’s just one of those stories.)

But too often, I see decisions about how the association is run (i.e., business decisions) being left to the IT staff, because the work involves a “technology solution.” Let me give you a recent example:

A past client of mine called me recently to update me on how things were going with their new database. She is the director of meetings, so her key interest in a new database was the ability to allow her members to register for events online.

Here it was, more than a year since they had gone live, and she tells me they still don’t have online meeting registration. I know the product they chose offers such functionality, so I asked her why it still wasn’t up. Her reply: “The IT staff didn’t like the online tool, so they said they’re going to build one themselves.”

“Have you or your staff seen the original online registration product yourself?” I asked.

“No,” she replied. “They made that decision without talking to us.”

This is exactly the kind of behavior I’m talking about. The online registration tool isn’t there to make the IT staff’s life easier; it’s there to make the customer’s life easier (and by the transitive property, the meeting registration staff’s life easier). For the IT staff to make that decision in a vacuum is really malpractice.

Is that happening in your organization? Are business decisions around technology being delegated to your IT staff because the senior management doesn’t want to get involved, or view it simply as a “technology” issue?

I’ve written in the past about seeking success, and not perfection, in your data management systems. The same can be said for any implementation of a new association or content management system.

During the implementation of a new AMS or CMS, staff will become very excited about the potential that a new system brings. Users will have visions of automating mundane tasks, customers and members taking care of their own records, and being able to gather tons of marketing data. While all of this may occur, in my experience, it rarely occurs the way staff expects.

One of the project manager’s key responsibilities is to help manage user expectations. One key expectation to make clear from the start is that no implementation will go perfectly. No matter how many resources are thrown at the project, no matter how good the software is, there will always be hiccups. Something is not going to work the way we expect it to.

One suggestion I make to my clients is to establish five or six primary objectives that can be measured, in order to benchmark progress on the implementation. For example, if one of your key objectives is to allow for online meeting registration, set that as one of your benchmarks. If the implementation achieves this, then you’ve been successful on that mark, and you should be happy about that. Too often we focus on the few things that did not work during the implementation, rather than focusing on all of the objectives we did achieve.

Understand that no implementation can be perfect, but they can still be successful. Focus on and celebrate your successes.