Amit Straus← Work
SystemRegrowthOne-year engagement
An information system for a nonprofit
Designed and implemented an end-to-end information system for a nonprofit, giving the organization the structure and tooling to operate at the scale its mission needed.
My role: Discovery, system design and implementation across a one-year engagement.
The problem
A nonprofit doing real work with the operational scaffolding of a much smaller organization. Effort was going into keeping track of things rather than into the mission.
What I did
- Mapped how the organization actually ran before proposing anything, including the parts held together by one person's memory.
- Built an end-to-end system covering programs, the people served, applications and reporting.
- Automated the links between records so the same information did not have to be entered in several places.
- Kept the sensitive parts of the process deliberately narrow, with clear separation between who could see what and who could approve payments.
What changed
- An organization able to operate with structure it did not previously have, over a one-year engagement.
- Reporting that could answer questions about the program rather than about the spreadsheet.
What I took from it
This is the project that best explains why I do this work. The same systems thinking that makes a software company slightly more efficient can materially change what a nonprofit is capable of. The leverage is not evenly distributed.
NonprofitProgram managementSystems designAutomation