Have you ever heard someone say “In love…” followed by some critical remark.  Example, “In love, you really need to start brushing your teeth.”  I find that 99.9% the remark… has no love in it.  It sounds nice but it usually is completely disingenuous.  How about starting “To be frank…” or “Let me cut to the chase…” or even Barack’s favorite, “Let me be clear…” These phrases say the same thing without the kindness that’s manufactured in an attempt to sugar coat the truth.

I know this is a odd thing to post. I might sound angry, trust me I’m not.  Just another trip into the scariness that are my thoughts.  To conclude I just want to say, in love, please find a new new way to be clear about your direct thoughts.

Is the Google / Twitter / IM age making us less able to commit to deep contemplative thought?  Watch this video for more info (don’t worry it’s only 2 mins long

Personally I believe this to be true because I see it within myself. As I read magazines I find myself thinking, “Interesting article… but too long…”. I usually fight it and read it anyways, but my inclination is not to.  You also see this in the number of people who stopped blogging and instead started twittering.  Blogging requires some level of thought… Tweeting does not.

I do think the skills of skimming and scanning are helpful, but I also believe that we need more slow contemplative thought.  Being able to do so could be what sets apart future leaders from the rest of the Facebook obsessed population.

BTW… Thanks Fora for the 2 min highlight of Carr’s one hour speech

I’m going to be on an eight week sabbatical starting Tuesday 6/22.  I hope to be blogging some, but mostly on the BacktotheFounders.com site (part of the goal of a sabbatical is getting away from church work).  Other goals include:

• Obviously tons of family time
• Lots of Bible reading
• Hope to greatly expand my iPhone programming skills
• Work on some Photoshop / InDesign skills
• Catch up on a stack of books I’ve been meaning to read

Any other ideas on what I should focus on?  Please share…

Adobe made an announcement today that will greatly impact the future of church bulletins.  The announce a new “Digital Viewer Technology” that will allow you to export full interactive digital magazines to iPad and other devices.  They used this technology to create the Wired digital magazine that was just released.  It’s not quite as cool as some of the other digital magazines available on iPad, but it’s certainly a great start, especially since it uses tools that most churches are already using (most of the features are already built into InDesign CS5).

Definitely look at the Adobe announcement for more details.  You can bet we’ll be looking at the interactivity tools built into InDesign CS5.  We just got it in for our department last week.

Here’s a quick video of what’s possible using this new tool…  The world… it is a changing….

Parents warn us to never talk about religion or politics… oops… well at least I do it separately. Check out my new blog on my thoughts on the state of our nation.  Don’t worry I haven’t given up on this blog.  Stay tuned for the latest on church IT and Communications.

Thanks to the individuals on our team our use of volunteers has gone through the roof.  Below are some lessons learned as we’ve increased our reliance on them.  Some of these concepts might seem a little contrary to popular opinion, but they have worked for us.

The Three Resources of a Volunteer
Any new volunteer should be assessed on three characteristics talent, time and heart (sorry I couldn’t find a t word for the last option… guess I’ll never be a pastor).  A successful volunteer must have the heart for long-term ministry AND at least one of the other two (talent or time).  Having all three makes for an uber volunteer.  These are rare and should be retained at all costs (save hiring… but more on that later)

The Gift of Time
In an Church IT department there’s room for both types of individuals.  If an individual has time and little talent they can but put to use handling tasks like imaging computers, running wires, installing software and possibly even doing break-fix on desktops.  We have a retired individual on our team who is worth is weight in gold. He gives us two days of his time every week.  While he doesn’t have server / network experience, he does all of our PC deployments, runs wires, replaces hard drives, researches part numbers, orders parts, and much much more.  His time (and heart) makes up for deep technical talent.  If we were to lose him we’d be hurting big time (plus he’s just a fun guy to be around).

Below is a quick list of other jobs that people with time, but limited skills can accomplish:

• ChMS Data Entry – This job could keep 2-3 individuals busy
• Account Creation / Deletion – Have them add new hire and volunteer accounts.
• Desktop / Laptop Deployment / Moves – You can teach anyone which cord goes where
• Computer Cleaning – A clean computer (including monitor, mouse, keyboard) is perceived to run faster and be more reliable.
• Software / Parts Ordering – If someone has the time / heart trust them enough to give them access to your vendors to order things and make sure they get in.
• Run Wires – Again if someone is the least bit handy you can teach them to run wires at least the easy ones.
• Printer Maintenance – Have then clean the printers out on a regular basis.
• Software Audits – Have them get your software inventory up to date and accurate.
• Clean the MDF – Have them sweep / wash / wax the computer room floors.

Someone once said that the creation of a checklist can turn any task that once too a genius to do into a task that anyone can do. A checklist also makes a repeatable process that improves  quality.  Win win.

The Gift of Talent
If someone has talent they usually don’t have much time to give.  They’re skills are in demand by a lot of people.  If given the heart to serve though these individuals still be a valuable resource.  We currently have several of these individuals on our team that help us write SQL reports, write code and give us technical advice.

One key to effectively using these volunteers is being flexible with their schedules.  Also, giving them access to work from home is huge.

You’ll Never Have Enough
After getting a couple of solid volunteers there’s a temptation to put the brakes on and not bring in any new ones.  Two forces though are working against you at all times: 1.) The amount of work always grows 2.) People, even good people with good hearts, eventually leave for lots of reasons (re-location, illness, etc.)  You should always be actively recruiting.  It’s also valuable to train your volunteers to help recruit.

Assigning Work
Treat them like new hires… you’d never tell a new hire ’sorry we don’t have anything to do today’.  You should translate that in your psyche to, ’sorry there’s not enough work to go around and since I’m paid I guess I better start looking for another job’.  Well… OK within reason… there may be certain things that volunteers don’t have the skills for, but more times than not we don’t give them the work because we 1.) feel like it’s more work for us to get them started or 2.) wonder if they do it what we’ll work on.  We have to see this as an investment of our time.  Teach them once and now we never need to do that job again.  You can even assign them to document it so the next person can do it without instruction.

When a work request comes in the first question you should ask is “which volunteer can I assign this to?.  If none are currently capable then the second question is “which of my volunteers can I train to do this?”  Only after exhausting both of these options should an paid person do the work.

Once  a new volunteer starts get them plugged into the workflow as soon as possible.  No one likes to show up and have to ask someone what they need to do (seriously, imagine if you had to do that). Get them added to your request system (even if it’s just a whiteboard) so that they can sit down and look at what needs to be done (just like you do).  This will give them much more ownership into the work and the team.  It will also remove the burden off of you to stop what you’re doing to get them started.  If you don’t have an IT request system consider getting one fast.  There are several free options like Spiceworks (we use the assignment functionality inside of the Arena ChMS).

I ran across a reference to Parkinson’s Law today and decided to dive a little deeper into it. Basically it states:

Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.

and / or

The demand upon a resource tends to expand to match the supply of the resource.

Parkinson used this theory to explain why the British Colonial Office grew in number of employees as the actual number of colonies declined – so that it employed more people when the number of colonies had been reduced to zero than when they were at their highest number.

I encourage you though to spend 5 minutes reading more about the theory behind this cheeky saying by reading the first half of this article in The Economist. Really it’s worth it.

I see the mechanics of this law in almost every organization I’ve ever worked at. I also see this at work in me. Over the last year or two it’s tempting to cry that myself and our team is ‘over-worked’ and that we need more resources. In fact our team has contracted quite a bit in the last two years while our attendance has jumped significantly. The key for me is 1.) Am I working on the right things 2.) How are we sharing the load with volunteers.

Knowing the facts of Parkinson’s Law will definitely bring clarity to future resource decisions.

Last week I posted about our Communications Scorecard. This week I thought I’d share the IT Scorecard. Most of this card is focused on our work requests. We’d love to add more to this card overtime, so if you have any ideas…

Just like the Communications Scorecard, we now have 2 quarters of data so we can start to see some trends. I’d really proud of the team that we have been able to reduce the average days a request is open by 47%. That’s a really significant change. Most of this change can be attributed to making the data more available. It really changes the way you look at requests. When I get new requests I prioritize them higher as I know each impacts the metric. It almost makes the requests a game.

There’s two new metrics we added to the scorecard this quarter (they have a value of q2). The first will track how many requests are closed by volunteers. We now have 5 volunteers who come in during the week. Our goal is to get them to work on as many tickets as possible to free us up for more projects. I can’t wait to see how many we can assign to volunteers this quarter!

The second metric will be the number of impact outages. These are all outages that occur during normal office / service hours. Things like servers that have to be rebooted during the work day, phone system drops, etc. Many of these we don’t have control over (like when Qwest’s PRI had issues last week) but some we can eliminate by smarter maintenance and thoughtful root cause analysis. This number may be too low to really matter, but we’ll see.

With no further delay… here’s the link.

We’ve been working on a scorecard concept for quite some time on our team. I’ve waited to share them until we had two quarters of real data so they could tell a full story. Here’s two scorecards we devised for the communications portion of our Creative Technologies Team.

Website Scorecard

Social Networking Scorecard

We left plenty of room to add future items, but I’m really happy with what we have to date, it’s a good start. If there’s one area that’s missing it’s some metrics on how fast we complete requests. The problem is that the nature of communications requests are typically longer in duration. Also, we definitely don’t want to punish people for planning ahead and giving us plenty of lead time. Something based on meeting deadlines may work.

So now on to the numbers:

Social Media – I’m really proud of the team in this area. We continue to create a dynamic environment for interacting with our community. We fell a bit in post quality. Some of that was due to the high bar we set in our first quarter. We also may have taken our eye of the ball a bit at the end of the quarter when we got busy with preparing for Easter and took some much needed time off. I can say this week has been off the hook on post quality (640 interactions and the week is still young). I’m expecting some great results this quarter!

We should also cross the 5,000 mark in fans this week. We just crossed the 5,000 fan mark as I write this post. Great milestone! Oh and there’s Twitter… surprise it’s still around. Would the last person please remember to turn off the light…?

Web – Our website traffic continues to grow despite being a very mature site (i.e. it’s been around for a long time and people are used to using it). The fact that traffic continues to grow tells me that our church is growing and our site remains an effective tool for communication. We’ve also found that our social networking wins spills over to the site through a high referral rate.

We have a new volunteer who is analyzing our site’s search engine logs and has turned up some interesting opportunities for improving some content areas. Looking forward to seeing her ideas get implemented.

Looking at these scorecards, can you suggest other items we should be measuring?

Coming soon… IT Scorecards…

I recently came across another great resource for creating signage. The book is called, “The Wayfinding Handbook” by David Gibson. What makes it a great resource is its full coverage of the topic of signage. It provides concise guidance on fonts, text sizes, colors, icons, materials, and project management. Since it’s a new book (2009) it also has a ton of relevant examples.

I did find the text of the book to be rather wordy. The book also covers the project planning side of a signage project. While this is valuable for large signage projects incorporating multiple vendors it seems a little grand for most church sized projects.

In my opinion though the design inspiration from the pictures alone is worth the price of the book.