A guide to your implementation
Lamplight is an established database system, which can be customised to fit around your team.
To customise your system to fit you, we’ll need your investment to support us to understand everything you do, how you do it, and what information you want Lamplight to provide you with.
Gathering information about your organisation
In our ‘Hearing from the experts’ stage, we have four calls learning about your organisation, and in each we follow a simple process which has proven to work well over many years.
- We discuss what we need, and you’ll gather the information
- We review the information before our next call
- We talk it through together
In each call we’ll learn about
- Call 1 – You, your services and team (and complete our project timeline)
- Call 2 – Your current information security
- Call 3 – Your operations, who does what, and how
- Call 4 – The information you need to produce from Lamplight (for funders, your own analysis)
Gathering information about your team
We’ll also learn about your team in our team consultations by
- Hearing from all your team through a deep-dive staff questionnaire
- Speaking with delivery team leaders, to better understand the nuances of their day to day
Time and commitment
As you may imagine, this takes time and commitment, not just from Lamplight, but from your project team as well. A customised Lamplight system is an investment. We’ll set-up a project timeline on our first call, and together agree responsibility for completing our work by those dates.
One Customer’s advice:
“Invest a small amount of time each week to keep the project alive and moving forward. By doing this I was surprised how quickly and easily it came together and didn’t seem like a massive drain on time and resources.”
What can I do to Prepare?
-
Inform your wider team you’re about to start and will be sending them a questionnaire to complete soon
-
Consider the data you wish to capture. This is likely to be contained across different forms/spreadsheets. Create a folder and start to gather your forms from across the team(s), such as referral form, registration form, questionnaires etc. During the implementation (as part of Call 3) we’ll want to explore all these together.
-
Consider the reports you need. What questions will you ask from your data? Start to gather these (perhaps KPI spreadsheets from funders or recent board report) as we’ll discuss these in details during Call 4.
-
Prepare your diary so you’ve time available to dedicate to the project.
“Spend the time in advance deciding which reports you want to have at the end.”
Where does the responsibility for completing our project lie?
While we will manage the project and ensure we’re all clear where we are on the timetable, the responsibility for delivering a Lamplight system in the agreed timeframe falls on both of us.
Between us, we’ll need to split responsibility like this:
Lamplight will | You will |
Give you all you need to gather the information | Work to gather the information need, involving your team as necessary |
Complete all our work to the agreed timelines | Make project completion a priority during this time, ensuring we keep to project timelines |
Keep a track of our project timelines and warn you if we’re in danger of drifting | Work with us to adjust meeting times and deadlines. |
Do all we can to support you to manage the change for your team, and hear their queries and concerns | Include your team throughout. We have resources that can support with this. |
Why do we do it this way
A Lamplight system is an investment in your future clients. A non-customised or poorly customised system that doesn’t fit your team or your services can add to your workload and damage your client focus.
We invest in understanding who you are, and all you do, so we can build a system that lightens your load, while simply blending into your daily life.
Photos by Anne Nygård, Chang Duong, Agê Barros, and Hadija on Unsplash.
Thank you!