What is Your Ministry Contract?
There is a term in the computer industry called SLA, or Service Level Agreement. It basically dictates what guarantees of service a vendor will provide to their customers, possibly on a per-customer basis. For services such as Internet connectivity or hosting, it can often be things like uptime, mean time between failures (MTBF), response time to emergencies, etc.
So, what is your ministry’s SLA for every service you offer? In the last post, Time Management Requires Process, we examined how a ministry can become overloaded and not able to make the impact they desire. In the process of this self-examination, there may have been a number of offered services that could be sorted into these categories:
- Legacy Deadwood – an offering that has “always been done” but really doesn’t need to be done if another alternative is presented or is just stopped altogether. Examples may include supporting old hardware by your IT department, producing those that no one reads, or cutting the ends of a roast (read at least half way and you’ll get the reference
- Tactical – an offering that is not strategic to a long-term vision but necessary for church or ministry operations. These are things like installing printer drivers, printing weekly bulletins, and accepting offerings during service.
- Strategic – an offering that is targeted to your long-term vision but may not be necessary for day-to-day operations
As you begin to classify your service offerings, you also have to make the decision of your ministry’s SLA for each offering. If you’ve never considered your SLA in the past, you should visit with the customers of your service and determine how much they depend upon them – you may be surprised at their response! Using an IT example (since that’s what I know best), consider: how important is supporting your key operational PCs vs. loaner laptops for volunteers? Are you focusing your volunteers to support those operational PCs, and possibly even having an on-call vendor or internal on-call services for support? Or, do you bump those requests to ensure your TPS reports get generated?
When you begin to approach your ministry’s offerings as a series of contracts with other ministries or staff members, you begin to see what truly matters day-in, day-out, week-in, week-out, month-in, month-out. It often will shed light on how much time you are spending toward things that have a lower SLA, or may even be “ends of a pot roast”.
So, consider an internal audit and SLA assessment. It may help you get better focused and be more effective at what your God-given calling is, and your customers will thank you for the considerations you are providing to make them successful!
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