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).

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.

Lately I’ve had this feeling of holy discontent worry about network security.  I think we do a good job of securing our network and servers, but… well… I don’t have anything that shows that.  Stack on the amount of time we proactively spend auditing network security and well… maybe I should worry.  What about you?

Recently I went on a hunt for some tools that could audit our network for known vulnerabilities.  We used these tools years ago when I worked for Honeywell.  I found a real gem in Nessus from Tenable Network Security.  This product is dead easy to install on Mac, Linux, or Windows, has thousands of security checks that are constantly updated, and is  dare I say fun to use.  And the best part… it’s only $1,200 per year for a feed of the latest audit checks… unless you’re a non-profit… then it’s FREE (just follow the instructions on their site to apply for the free license).

Running it on our servers brought up several issues that we needed to address.  Mainly some missing patches and software updates.  Each finding has a clear summary with solutions and links to vendor websites for more information.  It audits not only the operating system (all versions) but also web servers, database software, and much more.

Here’s a quick video on how to use the product.

I hope you’re able to get as much out of this product as we have this year.

A few months ago I did a post on running your membership data through a local sex offender database. We’ll here’s your quarterly reminder to re-run your database. Think you don’t need to run it that often? Perhaps the fact that we found two new matches in our database since we last ran ours will change your mind. Once you get the process down it should take you less than an hour to complete the process. A small price for protecting the children in your ministry.

This is a great thought on using e-mail effectively that I read at the end of Predictably Irrational…

“I THINK E-MAIL addiction has something to do with what the behavioral psychologist B. F. Skinner called “schedules of reinforcement.” Skinner used this phrase to describe the relationship between actions (in his case, a hungry rat pressing a lever in a so-called Skinner box) and their associated rewards (pellets of food). In particular, Skinner distinguished between fixed-ratio schedules of reinforcement and variable-ratio schedules of reinforcement. Under a fixed schedule, a rat received a reward of food after it pressed the lever a fixed number of times—say 100 times. (To make a human comparison, a used-car dealer might get a $1,000 bonus for every 10 cars sold.) Under the variable schedule, the rat earned the food pellet after it pressed the lever a random number of times. Sometimes it would receive the food after pressing 10 times, and sometimes after pressing 200 times. (Analogously, our used-car dealer would earn a $1,000 bonus after selling an unknown number of cars.) Thus, under the variable schedule of reinforcement, the arrival of the reward is unpredictable.

On the face of it, one might expect that the fixed schedules of reinforcement would be more motivating and rewarding because the rat (or the used-car dealer) can learn to predict the outcome of his work. Instead, Skinner found that the variable schedules were actually more motivating. The most telling result was that when the rewards ceased, the rats who were under the fixed schedules stopped working almost immediately, but those under the variable schedules kept working for a very long time. This variable schedule of reinforcement also works wonders for motivating people. It is the magic (or, more accurately, dark magic) that underlies gambling and playing the lottery. How much fun would it be to play a slot machine if you knew in advance that you would always lose nine times before winning once, and that this sequence would continue for as long as you played? It would probably be no fun at all! In fact, the joy of gambling comes from the inability to predict when rewards are coming, so we keep playing.
So, what do food pellets and slot machines have to do with e-mail? If you think about it, e-mail is very much like gambling. Most of it is junk and the equivalent to pulling the lever of a slot machine and losing, but every so often we receive a message that we really want. Maybe it contains good news about a job, a bit of gossip, a note from someone we haven’t heard from in a long time, or some important piece of information. We are so happy to receive the unexpected e-mail (pellet) that we become addicted to checking, hoping for more such surprises. We just keep pressing that lever, over and over again, until we get our reward. This explanation gives me a better understanding of my e-mail addiction, and more important, it might suggest a few means of escape from this Skinner box and its variable schedule of reinforcement.
One helpful approach I’ve discovered is to turn off the automatic e-mail-checking feature. This action doesn’t eliminate my checking, but it reduces the frequency with which my computer notifies me that I have new e-mail waiting (some of it, I would think to myself, must be interesting or relevant). Additionally, many applications allow users to link different colors and sounds to different incoming e-mail. For example, I assign every e-mail on which I’m cc’d to the color gray, and send it directly to a folder labeled “Later.” Similarly, I set my application to play a particularly cheerful sound when I receive a message from a source I’ve marked as urgent and important (these include messages from my wife, students, or members of my department). Sure, it takes some time to set up such filters, but having once gone to the trouble of doing so, I’ve reduced the randomness of the reward, made the schedule of reinforcement more fixed, and ultimately improved my life.”

Based on this article I started writing Inbox rules to color code my e-mails. I also disabled the notification of incoming e-mails except from a few distinct individuals. We’ll see how it goes.

We’ve stepped up our usage of ESRI’s ArcView a notch and are now using their Spatial Plugin. I’ve been wanting to create a heat map for a while of where our members and attendee’s live but never had the time to figure it out. Well… God provided us with a volunteer who has experience doing just this type of thing. David, our volunteer (not to be confused with our award winning programmer), put together this map for us AND taught me how it’s done. Thanks David!

(click map for larger image)

Notes: The color scale is not linear… so the darker green outer bands don’t represent as many homes as you might think (the smaller outer globs are probably 10-30 homes) The dark dot in the red is the location of CCV.

As a part of my transition to the Mac I’ve been try to dig deep into OSX to learn as much as possible. One thing I’ve been wanting to solve is mapping all of my typical shared drives at login. After searching and searching I was able to piece together this AppleScript that will mount of of my shares:

tell application “Finder”
try
mount volume “smb://ccvonline.com;jedmiston:xxxxx@ccvfs1.ccvonline.com/Creative Technologies_ccvfs”

on error
display dialog “There was an error mounting the volume Creative Technologies.” & return & return & ¬
“The server may be unavailable at this time.” & return & return & ¬
“Please inform the Network Administrator if the problem continues.” buttons {“Okay”} default button 1
end try

try
mount volume “smb://ccvonline.com;jedmiston:xxxxxx@ccvfs.ccvonline.com/home/jedmiston”

on error
display dialog “There was an error mounting the volume home.” & return & return & ¬
“The server may be unavailable at this time.” & return & return & ¬
“Please inform the Network Administrator if the problem continues.” buttons {“Okay”} default button 1
end try

try
mount volume “smb://ccvonline.com;jedmiston:xxxxx@ccvfs.ccvonline.com/30 Day Drop”

on error
display dialog “There was an error mounting the volume 30 Day Drop.” & return & return & ¬
“The server may be unavailable at this time.” & return & return & ¬
“Please inform the Network Administrator if the problem continues.” buttons {“Okay”} default button 1
end try

end tell

(be sure to substitute your password in place of the xxxxx’s)

Save this script as and Application and set it as one your your ‘Login Items’ and your ready to roll.

CCV’s ministry revolves around what we call Neighborhood Ministry. Every part of our church is focused on plugging people into their neighborhoods where they can build relationships and share the love of Christ. As a Information Technology Creative Technology department we work hard to help support this ministry with the best tools technology can provide. We’ve been focused recently with the latest GIS tools from ESRI. They have a new web based mapping product that allows us to project the maps that used to hang in our offices out to our neighborhood leaders. The server technology is built into their ArcGIS server product. You have several options on how to place it on a page. We decided to use their Flex API as it provided the best UX by far. You can see a short video demo here. Sorry, it’s not one of my best videos… I had a pretty bad headache… but really wanted to get it done to share.

The data presented on the various parcels is read real-time out of a SQL database. We refresh the database once a day. We do this so that we can de-normalize the data for speed.

Hummm… looks like Google Maps has changed in a very significant way. On Oct 7th they started using their own source for map data. They also quietly added parcel boundaries to the street maps. Very interesting!!! Geographical Information Systems are getting incredibly important these days (an update on our efforts at CCV is forthcoming). Google is on a good path to move ahead of the competition by sourcing their own data. I wonder if a Google buy-out of GIS market leader ESRI is in the cards…

Well this won’t be news to some people, but I made the switch to Mac a few months ago. I just realized I never blogged that fact, which might make some of my next few posts on my favorite new Mac programs a bit odd to some…

I switch both at home (MacBook Pro) and more surprisingly at work too (same)…

The move to switch at home was mainly due to wanting a laptop and a machine I could continue my wildly successful iPhone development…

A couple months later my executive pastor mentioned that we should consider getting a mac or two in IT so that we would A.) Be able to support them better and B.) Be ready to be able to write iPhone apps. These reasons matched with my desire to move from a desktop (we now have conference rooms with projectors) lead to pulling the trigger.

While I do spend some time in Parallels, I’m surprised how rarely it’s required. I’m also very happy to be reunited with my first OS love… Unix. Just the other day >cat *.log | grep jedmiston > out.txt saved my day. I even got to use vi yesterday… ahh…

I’ll be posting more about the switch… but I wanted to tee up the change with this initial post.