Why You Should Take Client Psychology Into Account as an Access Developer

Mike Wolfe -

Ramit Sethi is a Stanford-trained behavioral psychologist who also has his own Netflix show on personal finance.  

In a recent newsletter, he answered a common question,

"Should we pay off our mortgage faster or invest?"

Here's his response:

I'm going to tell you right off the bat that the answer to this question is based on two things: math and psychology.

The math

If the interest rate is around 6% or higher, mathematically, it probably makes sense to pay off the mortgage faster. If it's lower, it makes no sense to pay it off faster. In fact, you should stretch that thing out for as long as humanly possible. That's the math part.

This is called opportunity cost. You could take the money that you would otherwise be paying off your mortgage faster and put it in an index fund. Over the course of a long period of time, you can reasonably expect to make about 7% to 8% on that money, factoring in inflation.

The psychology

Now the psychology part. The psychology of some people is that they just hate debt. They think it makes them morally irresponsible. It feels like something is choking them. I can sit here and show them math all day long and they go, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever, I hate debt." If they understand that, for example, paying off a 3% mortgage 15 years early will cost them literally hundreds of thousands of dollars that they could have made by investing that money, and they go, "I don't care. I just want to be rid of debt," I say, "Fine, go ahead."

Not everything in your Rich Life is about the numbers, but you need to understand both the numbers and the psychology, especially on massive decisions like this.

So what does this have to do with custom software development?  Don't worry, I'm getting there.

SQL Server Migration or New Features?

Ramit's answer came to my mind during a discussion about a new client.

It was a fairly common situation:

  • Client has a business critical Access application.
  • Data is stored in Access back-end files.
  • The current system has several performance problems.
  • The client also has a list of feature requests unrelated to performance.

Now, the most cost effective approach to fix the situation is this:

  1. Migrate backend data to SQL Server.
  2. Address the performance problems.
  3. Complete the feature requests.

That's only the math part, though.  What about the psychology?

At a psychological level, most clients will get frustrated and impatient with the above approach.  In some cases, they'll abandon the project before you ever get past step 1.

There are a few problems:

  • Clients can't "see" infrastructure changes.  To them, it looks like no work is being done at all.  And yet they're still getting invoices.
  • Done right, infrastructure changes are tedious and require careful attention to detail.  In other words, they're slow.
  • New clients need to "see" that you know what you're doing.  Spending weeks or months saying, "Don't worry, we got this," probably won't do much to assuage their concerns.

A Better Approach

You need to let the client "see" some early results.

  1. Complete a few low-hanging-fruit feature requests.
  2. Migrate backend data to SQL Server.
  3. Address the performance problems.
  4. Complete the remaining feature requests.

The key is to pick feature requests that are:

  • Quick to implement
  • Have a strong visual component (e.g., a new form, new report, etc.)
  • Won't need to be rewritten after the SQL Server migration

Remember, "not everything in your [Access Consulting] Life is about the numbers, but you need to understand both the numbers and the psychology, especially on massive decisions like this."

Cover image generated by Ideogram.