Relationship Table - Overwhelm

Emily Bastow · December 2024

Our relationship table is out of control, with more than 100 options, it isn't very helpful. Does anyone have a more curated relationship table that they would like to share for examples.

Dariel Dixon · December 2024

@Emily Bastow I think it depends on the types of relationships you want to record. At my org, we record familial relationships up to a point. Maybe only two generations. In regard to business relationships, we try to keep it simple. Employee, and employer is the standard, with the position field used to handle titles. Board relationships are handled similarly. We also keep former versions of these options as well, so that increases the number of table entries tremendously.

I wouldn't worry about getting down to a specific number. If there are too many options, then it's not helpful. When you have too many overlapping options, run table cleanup.

Karen Diener · December 2024

@Emily Bastow

As usual, Dariel has a great point. Overlapping or redundant entries make it out of control, but if certain entries are necessary than it is not out of control.

A few things I see, and tactics I use to approach cleanup with clients:

You don't need “sister” and "brother" - just use “sibling”. Apply those same rules to all familial relationships, such as parent/child, niece/nephew, aunt/uncle, grandparent/grandchild, etc.
Don't get too specific. I often see “President” (or some other job title) as an entry. There is a Position field for this data - relationship / reciprocal values should be “Employer / Employee”. This is definitely what I consider clutter and out of control. Similarly, a field might see “contact” but then the “is contact” and “contact type” fields are not used.
Some organizations use “former” or “deceased” attached to their relationships, and I'm okay with that. So you might see “Former Employer and Former Employee” values, or “deceased sibling”. I didn't love the “deceased” values when I first encountered them, but have softened a bit because it IS important information and more visible.
Lastly, there might be values that are borderline helpful. I don't have a good example, but it is often an initial reaction like “this might be useful / important and doesn't really fit in any other fields”. When I see those, I query to see how many records are using the table value. Very often it is one or none, which helps make my decision!

Hopefully some of these suggestions will help!

Karen

Christine Robertson · December 2024

@Emily Bastow @Dariel Dixon and @Karen Diener have great advice and much of what I would say would echo their thoughts. I would just add that there is often great value in marking code table entries as inactive while you're figuring out the cleanup process. It makes the dropdown menu shorter immediately while giving you time to carefully plan your clean up and assess what you actually do/don't need.

Relationship Table - Overwhelm

Comments

Categories