Perfection is the enemy of the good

CRM systems and their functional components such as fundraising, ticket sales, communication with subscribers and other stakeholders, membership management, and case management are essential for the core operations of most non-profits. This can lead to a legitimate fear of project failure when changing them. However, this fear can easily create a perfectionist mentality, where the project team attempts to overcompensate by creating too much oversight, too much contingency planning, and too much project discovery time in an effort to avoid missing any potentially useful feature that could be integrated into the project. While planning is good, perfection may not be good, since perfection is often the enemy of the good.

CRM implementations risk erring on the side of what is known, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, as the MIT Approach. The MIT approach believes in, and attempts to design, construct, and deploy, the "Right Thing" right from the start. Its big-brain...