I’ve seen it time and time again – it all starts with a 70-page RFP from a non-profit that wants donor-relation management, content management, events management, complete real-time integration with their legacy systems, web services integration with their partners, mass-email capabilities, online donations and an online store, real-time tracking of the work they are doing in the field updated from satellites. They want a quote, and they want it now. The cheaper the better.
Then the 60-page responses come flooding in as well – there’s the Indian firm that promises all of that, plus several weeks of training for $15K – delivered in 6 weeks or less. There’s the massive vendor that’s throws in $125K as a starting point, vague about the timing and the custom programming costs but more than willing to put you in contact with one of their 50 sales representatives. There’s the small firm that recommends using a few existing tools, using a few pre-built tools and offers an expensive but competitive bid.
Depending on what the non-profit chooses, one of a few things happen. The Indian firm ends up charging 3-4 times what they originally planned since nobody at the non-profit realized that for $15K the requirements gathering phase amounts to little more than reading the RFP again, so every piece of code that was written had to be re-written multiple times before it was adequate. That big vendor? Well, they forgot to mention the $1 per email fee, the $500/hour training fee, the $4,500 AS-400 integration fee and the fact that nobody actually knows how to download that data from the field to a GPS, so that feature was scrapped. Oh, did I mention the $2K per month hosting fee? Over at the smaller firm they are really making an effort – but staffing is an issue and their contractors are spread thinly across multiple projects and progress is very slow. As the requirements change, the small firm adapts quickly, but it means that lots of the core functionality keeps getting pushed off.
As bleak as those scenarios may seem, more often than not what I’ve observed in real life is that many non-profits experience most if not all of these in an almost cyclical way. Once burned by big vendors, they turn the projects in-house, but then have staffing problems and outsource again, each time around paying again and again for the same 90% of the functionality they already had and never really getting that last 10% that actually makes people’s lives better. This is the cycle of doom.
I don’t propose to have a solution to the cycle of doom but I am convinced that using Ruby on Rails and agile methodologies can be a big part of the solution. Over the next few weeks I’ll be posting several non-technical posts for those in non-profits who are trying to figure out what they need as well as technical posts for developers who are trying to use Ruby on Rails to build their personal product-lines for non-profits.
