Stop! Your Christmas production work isn't over. I get it, you had the Christmas production with the lights and the haze and even a disco ball. So now, days or weeks later, you think your work is done. It's not! You have one last task to accomplish; remember what you learned so next year's work is even better (dare I suggest even less stressful). You
can do this by evaluating four areas of your latest Christmas production work.
1. Evaluate Your Time.
There is something more dangerous than procrastination; under-estimation. Evaluate how much time you spent preparing for the Christmas production. Write down the hours you spent emailing your team, the choir director, the Christmas production director, etc. Write down the time you spent working at the church and at home. As an aside, if your spouse said "you were home but I felt you were still at church" then that's considered working from home. Now ask yourself if all that time was enough time.
Reflecting back on all of this time, ask yourself if you needed more time. If you did, in what areas did you need more time? Here's the best part, maybe you didn't need extra time as much as you needed a better process.
Develop a list of areas where you spent time, such as meetings, emails, stage design, video planning, volunteer oversight, etc. Then, for each item, separate out a list of tasks you could have delegated to someone else or that you could have dumped because, in retrospect, it was wasted time. This get's you started on an improved process for next year.
2. Evaluate your volunteer needs and availability.
Christmas season is a time of vacations and the Christmas production is often a time of needing extra volunteers or using all of those you have available. How did your volunteer scheduling and availability work out this year?
Evaluate the volunteer needs of your most recent production and make a list of the positions you need filled; audio, lighting, video, stage crew, set builders, etc. Next, look at their availability. Did you run around the week before the production looking for volunteers? Don't let that happen next year. Develop a list of volunteer positions and the date and time requirements of these positions. Come September or October, plan for who you will need to fill those positions and notify those people with that information. For people using Planning Center, this is simple.
3. Evaluate your equipment usage.
During this year's Christmas production, did you have to buy new audio equipment? Did you have to rent equipment? Did you run short on equipment and have to change around the production to fit your equipment limitations? You must evaluate your equipment requirements and start planning for next year's production.
Start the evaluation by looking at your equipment limitations. For example, if you have to change around the production or the production suffered because you were short one vocal microphone, then you must plan for more vocal microphones for next year, assuming the production was similar. If your production changes drastically, year from year for this example, then make a point of documenting microphone requirements during the early Christmas planning meetings.
Once you know your equipment limitations (and future needs), then you can plan on meeting those needs. For example, if you don't have enough vocal microphones, find out if you can borrow some from another church. Maybe rental equipment is the way to go. But, before you go down the rental route, evaluate the financial requirements and determine if rental or ownership is better. For example, if you are renting a few vocal mic's every year and would need to do so for the next three or four years, consider purchasing the microphones.
4. Evaluate everything else.
You've seen the major areas of evaluation but you know there's a lot more to putting on a Christmas production than time, volunteer availability, and equipment needs. Evaluate the time your team spent preparing for the production. Evaluate the team's work during the production. Just don't forget the non-technical areas. For example, did you have communication problems with the choir director so you didn't know their needs until the last minute? If so, what could you do next year to prevent that problem? It was your Christmas production. You were there. You know what you need to learn for next year.
Summary
Take the time today to list out what you learned from last year's Christmas production. Come next holiday season, you don't want to hear yourself say, "oh yeah, we had this same problem last year." Be pro-active, have a plan, and enjoy the next Christmas season.
