A writer friend of mine tweeted “I’ll take finished over perfect any day.” I hovered over “retweet” as I weighed the message. What does that say about me if I retweet it? Does it say I’m lazy or efficient? From a writing standpoint – there’s no point in editing something down to perfection if it’s not complete, better to finish and have a product to work with than battle over the choice of “an” or “the” in the first sentence.
From a membership management software standpoint, will you ever find perfection? Will you ever find the product that fits your business processes to a tee, no alterations required? You might, if you build it yourself around your own processes and absorb all of that expense and time within your organization. Even if you hire an outside group to customize it for you, there will be endless meetings, planning sessions and project management required. And what is the cost of the downtime to your organization; the time that you could’ve had your software in place, a new website, a community for private use? If you complete the project six months or a year from now, did you lose anything in that time? Potential members? Conversations? Cost-savings and time-savings behind having to manually run your events or dues processing?
If you’re a writer worth your salt, you’ll admit perfection is unattainable. Even the greats struggle with self-doubt. Perfection is subjective. What is perfect one day might not be the next, nor might it seem perfect to someone else on your board or staff. Finished, on the other hand, allows you to mark something off your to-do list and focus on something else. At some point, anyone assigned to a task – whether it’s writing a novel or selecting technology for your organization – has to put down the proverbial pen and call it finished. Perfect or not.
Choosing a technology solution involves research and comparison-shopping. It can be an exasperating time trying to note the differences between products and what vendors “fit” your organization and what don’t. If you don’t perform your due diligence you may regret your decision or delay your implementation. But at some point it’s time to say the search is over – perfection relegated to a subjective theory – and find what works for you right now because you might discover that you too prefer “finished over perfection any day.”
