Abdul Ghafoor Fazal (AGF)

Have a benefits first approach, supported next by arguments and then by data and facts is the best way to approach busy professionals who are short on bandwidth and patience. Once you have them hooked on a potential solution/ answer then take them down you storyline on the approach and what/why is that you believe is the best way.

Understanding of their needs and re-articulating them to clarify your understanding is paramount. This serves dual purpose of clarification of scope and well as sometimes prodding the mind of the client to think harder on what they problem is and what their need is. From experience, defining a problem accurately is the hardest step and not enough is spent on it. This way, you don't end up treating the symptom rather than the underlying issue.

What your organisation aims to achieve in short, medium and long term needs to be very clear. As with any startup team, there is bound to be an uphill journey, dead ends, deviations etc. Below is some ways i have managed this - A clear roadmap that is communicated regularly with your startup team. This should be divided into short, medium and long term - Get those short term, low hanging fruits. This is super important for maintaining momentum. - Addressing your teams personal aspirations, insecurities would go a long way to keeping them together. Even at the darkest, they have to believe that it is going to be dawn soon.

A needs analysis for a non-profit is complex. I have had exposure on this from a professional capacity advising on a large infrastructure project. Some of these projects may not score well on your standard IRR metrics, however these benefits are measured over a much longer horizon and also on the ripple effects over the economy. For example, in a large public transportation initiative, effects could be - Access to transportation at reasonable costs, - Reduction of pollution, - reduction of congestion, - reduction of wear and team on the roads leading to infrastructure maintenance cost savings, - improving the speed of movement of goods over borders in turn leading to cost savings.

Analysing data today require integrating all your systems as your data may lie in various semi-connected silos some examples are outlined below. A typical sequence could take a form such as: Your outbound call data from Voip, this maybe integrated to your CRM, your webpage visitor data is pulled from google analytics and this is then analysed again maybe using your accounting systems to understand client life time value and then money spent on customer acquisition. The mantra is experiment, gather data and then optimise.

Automating tasks is an art by itself. With the proliferation of tools and connectors such as Zapier, it does look like every task can be automated. Practically this is never the case. Automating tasks require a thorough understanding of ones operations and an ever deeper understanding of what can be automated in terms of easy wins and getting an understanding of the savings you gain due to this automation. I have been guilty myself of trying various automation tactics due to allure of a new shiny new tool and what it can do. However, with the number of tools required today to run an organisation from Accounting, Payroll, HR, Inventory, CRM, it is imperative every organisation tries to automate even it takes them just marginally forward.