The Real Cost of Network Downtime

I had lunch with a fellow Executive Director the other day who was REALLY stressed out—his organization’s network was down and he had his quarterly Board meeting coming up. He couldn’t access some vital information and he was looking at a couple of all nighters to meet his deadline. This is the flip side to the benefit that technology provides us—without it we often cannot do our work.

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We are proud to be featured once again as “one of the best” charities in the 2010/2011 Catalogue for Philanthropy. Each year hundreds of local nonprofits undergo a rigorous selection process to be one of 68 organizations selected. This year’s panel included ninety expert reviewers from area foundations, corporate giving programs, the DC government, and local non-profit organizations. You can view our profile on the Catalogue site by going to http://www.cfp-dc.org (then search us by name). Please help spread the word about the Catalogue so that together we can deepen the culture of giving in our nation's capital.

The key to any technology implementation is project management. We thought that this short article from a consultant friend of ours, Konstantin von Schmidt-Pauli, from ProjexPM.com, lays out some clear guidelines.

• It’s all in the requirements — well-defined business and functional requirements are essential. A designated person who intimately knows your organization should run the process, gather requirements across the organization, document functional requirements, build use cases, and flow diagrams so that a developer can implement them with minimal need for interpretation.

• Get everyone on the same page — build an integrated master schedule so everyone involved with the project (project team members, stakeholders and external vendors) know the tasks, dependencies, and timeframes required. There are lots of options for tracking progress from Microsoft Project to Google to a plain old spreadsheet.

• Strong leadership and communications — the more complex the project, the more you need a strong, dedicated project leader to help coordinate, facilitate, communicate, and track all the moving parts to ensure project success.
Implementing standard project management processes and following these tips as part of the project “to do” list, can ensure your project goes according to plan.

We are fans of the webinars which our friends at NTEN run and wanted to highlight two that are coming up.

The August Ask the Expert session addresses technology trends that will affect your organization’s work. Listen to Edward Granger-Happ, the Global CIO of International Red Cross, opine on where you should invest your technology dollars. He is the former Chief Information Officer at Save the Children where he has worked for the past decade. This one hour event is free for NTEN Members! Session begins at 11am PT on August 30. Register today.

You might also want to check out what sounds like a compelling session on Introduction to Online Storytelling. This webinar will introduce participants to the importance and impact of online storytelling, as well as explain how to get storytelling started in their respective organizations. This webinar will also discuss the application of storytelling across social media, newsletters and web sites with helpful examples from organizations that are already using this approach. The session is led by a web guru from DC Based Forum One. This event is $69 for NTEN members and $99 for Non-members. Session runs from 10:00 to 11:30 PT on September 15. Register today.