1. Take a few minutes to read Perry’s post.
2. Then, use my Squidoo lense to view my recent series on project management for your ministry
3. Finally, make plan and execute it

Thanks to Ernie at the Media Ministry Blog for the kind reference to the current series, “Growing Your Ministry Through…”, and the reference to Perry’s post. Ernie has a great blog – check it out.

[tags]church management, project management, church leadership[/tags]

1. What worked well on our milestone/project?
2. What didn’t work so well?
3. How can we improve our next milestone/project?

Go around the room and ask everyone to contribute at least one answer to spark discussion. Encourage your team to be open and honest, and make it fun rather than painful for them. Hand out awards for the silliest, most honest, most interesting, and most number of contributed comments. When you are done, gather these answers together, document them, and send them to the team and your ministry’s leader(s). Make improvements, encourage building upon successes and admitting to failures (but require brainstorming on improvements). Pray with your team before and after the meeting.

Finally, send thank-you notes to everyone on the team, hand-written, and possibly even a gift card to a restaurant or store. This is your time to build upon what worked and use that momentum to push into the next project, but always be sure to give your team time to decompress and rest up first.

And, in the end, remember: It’s about the volunteers!

[tags]project management, ministry managment, volunteer management, church management[/tags]

1. For each milestone, expand out the tasks that need to be done for the next 2-4 weeks and no more
2. Determine who on your team is available during that time and if the skillsets you need are available
3. If skillsets are missing, adjust your timeline or your milestone tasks
4. Otherwise, ask your team where they feel comfortable contributing based on their available time and the skills needed
5. Have them estimate when they can complete the work, taking into account personal time with family, work schedules, and general availability
6. Gather the estimates, estimate an end date for the work, and add/remove tasks as needed to reach your milestone date, as appropriate. Consider reviewing your list of risks to determine if the estimates take those things into account
7. As the tasks are completed, gather metrics on how long it actually took and use these metrics when estimating the next milestone

As you can see, there is a lot of work to be done. So, start slow and simple, keep the milestones small and achievable, and build upon your successes. This is truly where your volunteers have a chance to utilize their gifts, give of their time and talent, and where they will either evangelize your ministry for good or ill. Out of these projects come a sense of teamwork, closeness, and craftsmanship. From this, it builds excitement, which leads to easier volunteer recruiting and project management in the future.

[tags]project management, ministry managment, volunteer management, church management[/tags]

1. Projects have a defined end, so they can commit without fear of never getting out
2. Projects have momentum, usually because of the excitement and stated goals
3. Projects sometimes require a fresh skillset that allow volunteers to help when they normally wouldn’t have a spot on your team

In addition, recruiting for projects has many benefits to your ministry:

1. They can provide new volunteers and relieve some of the burden of your existing team
2. They force ministry leaders to think in terms of teaching others, creating a system of growth rather than stagnation
3. They provide the leader with the option of letting difficult volunteers go once a project is complete

If you are new, or just need a refresher course, take a look at a post from six months ago titled Recruiting Volunteers if you need some tips on how to reach out and find volunteers within your church.
[tags]volunteering, church recruiting, project staffing, project recruiting, ministry leadership[/tags]

1. Research

Given your requirements, identify as many options as possible using search engines, word-of-mouth references, and phone calls. This is your chance to find anything even remotely close to what you need. In fact, experiment with performing searches using different keywords, or find things similar to your problem but not exactly the same. You never know when a solution from another industry or by a different name may match your problem closer than you think. You should be capturing: cost, any of the requirements it fulfills, any of the requirements it fails to deliver, the website or brochures, contact information of anyone that helped or referred you, and any additional notes about the solution that may not be a direct requirement but helpful.

2. Rate

Identify the top 3 advantages and top 3 disadvantages for each decision and list them. Be honest, and make sure you did enough research to back your beliefs. You may even want to build a matrix using a spreadsheet to cross-ref your requirements with the product, along with other interesting tidbits such as price and warranties/support.

3. Revisit and Categorize

Group the options into 3 categories:

• Best for the cost – solutions that would provide the most value to the church
• Best for the budget – solutions that would be the most cost efficient, typically the lowest total cost of ownership (TCO)
• Best for the team – solutions that free you and your team up to support your staff, members, and visitors and possibly reduce the barrier to entry for new volunteers to join (vs. solutions that may require more time and/or attention from your team)

At the end of the process, you should have 1-3 candidates of varying cost and options, from which you and your ministry/staff can pray over and make the right decision. Spending a little time up front can save hours, days, or even weeks of pain and frustration and prevent you from spending too much time or money on a solution that doesn’t fit your needs.

[tags]Buy vs. Build, project planning, project plans[/tags]

We still need to make wise use of the funds available. But we also shouldn’t have guilt for buying a state of the art projector or top-notch signage for our facilities.

We must understand the impact of those tradeoffs to not only your staff and members, but most importantly, to your future visitors. As you are planning your project, you must spend time evaluating what is out there. Whether it is for a web redesign, new marketing collateral, or a new building, you should have more than one option and at least one should require a decision about money.

A great example (on a smaller scale) is the purchase of hard drives. How easy is it to go find a cheap hard drive at Fry’s, Best Buy, or some other outlet? They even come with rebates that give you an even better deal! But, instead of rushing out, you should be weighing out the options:

1. What are my other options/models?
2. What are their cost and feature differences?
3. What is the mean time between failure (MTBF) of those drives – will I be replacing them in 6 months? Does a quick Google search reveal disgruntled buyers?
4. Will they be used 24 x 7 x 365 or just in limited use? hould I consider RAID 1 or RAID 5 to provide a better reliability?
5. Will my visitors suffer if I select something cheaper, then it fails at a bad time?

Remember the tradeoffs and weight the options – this is what Jesus asks us to do when He says to “count the costs” before we begin.

[tags]Buy vs. Build, project planning, project plans[/tags]

Every project that I’ve been involved with, whether as a lead or simply a team member, has had requirements. Some projects didn’t document those requirements, causing finger pointing later on when misunderstandings surfaced. Other projects started before gathering requirements and didn’t count the cost or the time required. The projects that operated the best did both of these things: identified needs up front, and documented them. Here is a simple method for capturing requirements:

1. Interview each of your customers and stakeholders – find out what they are looking to be accomplished, as well as what is most important to them
2. Document these requirements using a spreadsheet, with columns such as “id”, “requirement”, “priority”
3. Prioritize the tasks based on your interview, using labels such as “must”, “should”, and “nice”
4. Organize each requirement by milestone by adding a new column call “milestone”
5. (Optional) Determine dependencies (task 2 requires task 1 to be complete) and capture it in a new column called “depends”

Keep in mind that a project’s requirements may change over time. The longer a project is, the more often that things will change – budgets, needs, timelines, team members, etc. This may force requirements to be moved out to future milestones or out of the plan entirely, so your requirements document will be a “living document” – one that changes over time. That is part of being an agile ministry, allowing change to be accepted and and allowing your ministry/project to remain relevant.

[tags]project management, project plans, requirements[/tags]

Remember, this is just a strawman project plan and does not include anything other than high-level requirements given to us by stakeholders. We’ll dive deeper into requirements gathering process, as well as recruiting for your project and managing the project to the plan, in future posts. What this strawman offers us is a chance to communicate our first guess of a project timeline to all of those involved, determine overlap of the project with other projects within the ministry and church, and to verify that the most basic of stakeholder needs are understood by you. Finally, this level of a plan should never be used to hold people accountable (you or your team), only a rough estimate.

[tags]project management, timelines, project plans[/tags]

1. Select a start or end date: if a target end date is required, from from the end backward, otherwise select a feasible starting date in the future
2. Add high-level tasks to each milestone and estimate the work of each task
3. Mark the estimated time for each milestone to be fully completed given the estimates of the high-level tasks
4. Document your assumptions about how you arrived at these dates (number of people, budget, skillsets, requirements, etc) and any risks that could jeopardize your project
5. Verify that the timeline matches external needs and timelines and that it is feasible

With your new strawman plan, you can begin to ask the key questions at this stage:

1. Do we have enough time to finish this project? If not, what part of the iron triangle needs to change?
2. Do all stakeholders agree that this strawman is valid based on current assumptions? If not, document the changes and revise the strawman plan
3. Have you prayerfully considered if this project should continue? Often, God will use this phase of the exercise to steer you in another direction or show you that the timing isn’t right

These questions need to be asked of yourself, and during a meeting with your stakeholders, as a go/no go decision is made for your project. Keep in mind that multiple meetings may be required, as you may have to perform more research to answer any outstanding questions raised by your stakeholders. Place enough time in your strawman plan that you can be certain that it is feasible based on what you know now and the assumptions you have documented. Things change, but finger pointing can be avoided by setting the proper expectations during the life of the project – this plan is the starting point for these expectations!

Finally, remember that for your project to be successful, you need to have buy-in from your volunteer team as well. This plan will be the primary communication device for your team of staff and volunteers – it is a living plan that will be constantly updated as you learn more. Use this plan as a communication tool, update it often, revisit your assumptions and risks, and ensure you always have buy-in from your team. In the end, you will have done a great job of managing your team and your stakeholders and have a great chance of being successful!

[tags]project management, timelines, project plans[/tags]

The principle of the Iron Triangle in project management states that for any change on one side, one side (or both) must change as well. For example, if we have a limited amount of time to accomplish a task (fixed date), then we either add more cost or reduce scope. If we need to reduce the cost, we must add time or reduce scope. If we need to keep the scope of work intact, we may need to increase time, cost, or both. Seems simple on paper, but it is hard to manage when reality settles in.

So, what is it that your project requires most: time, money, or a specific feature set/scope? That is the driving factor for your project, and a compromise of the other two factors will be required (more time, more money, or reducing features). When planning your project, be sure to understand what the tradeoffs are, and what the priorities are at each milestone. This helps manage expectations with your stakeholders and volunteers as you begin to set your timeline, and also helps manage risk when things happen that you least expect.

[tags]project management, church management, church leadership[/tags]