Thoughts on development
There are a lot of organizations that can achieve their goals with CiviCRM out of the box. Some organizations though will want to, or need to, customize CiviCRM to their needs. If you do want to customize CiviCRM there are two aspects to think about:
- Can we customize CiviCRM ourselves or do we need to get external help? And if so, where do we get it?
- What development methodology would suit us best?
Where to get help?
As CiviCRM is open source, anyone with the right skills can customize CiviCRM. Luckily, the community helps: CiviCRM has partners that are part of the community and have proven their CiviCRM capabilities. You can find the CiviCRM partners on the CiviCRM website at https://civicrm.org/experts. If you do not want to be limited to CiviCRM partners, make sure that whoever helps you is an active community member that posts blogs, answers forum posts, takes part in CiviCRM events, and so on.
Development methodologies
If you are customizing CiviCRM, you need to think...