If you are a church leader or responsible for a ministry, you are most likely all too familiar with deadlines and budgets. And like all churches, you want to do all you can to be sure your programs are well attended and the best that they can be. All of those “moving parts” associated with the projects of a growing church can lead to stress for you, your staff, and volunteers. In response, many church leaders are looking to project management software to help them to organize their work, act more immediately when problems arise, and make assigning and completing work easier. The key is to find the software that works for you.
“Trello simplifies all details and visual clutter of a project for us, with an extremely intuitive format.”
—Bill Wyramon, Video Production Director, The Summit Church, Kernersville, NC
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Bill Wyramon, Video Production Director at Summit Church locations in Kernersville and Oak Ridge, North Carolina, describes how much Trello had helped him wrangle his active project schedule and make sense of all the details, "I found our church’s Trello account, dove in, and never looked back.”
Bill Wyramon, Video Production Director at Summit Church locations in Kernersville and Oak Ridge, NC, says that project management has been a life saver for him over the years. “I've used Trello project management software for several years now and it's been very helpful,” he says. “At one point, trying to stay on top of multiple projects had me depressed, anxious, overwhelmed, overworked, exhausted, and generally feeling defeated. I was looking for an answer when I heard another filmmaker talk on his podcast about how he had to get a handle on at least one part of his life, so he dove into project management. When he described how much Trello had helped him wrangle his active project schedule and make sense of all the details, I found our church’s Trello account, dove in, and never looked back.”
Wyramon’s story is not atypical. Church leaders can easily find themselves in a ‘spinning plates in the air’ scenario having to coordinate the time-sensitive demands of weekly services, media releases, hosting conferences, important seasonal productions, and construction/remodeling projects. “Using Trello simplifies all details and visual clutter of a project for us,” he says, “with an extremely intuitive format. Also, the ability to add multiple dates to different aspects of the project (air dates, script due dates, filming dates) is extremely helpful. There are very easy copy-and-paste features that make quick work of creating checklists.”
Why Project Management Software Works
It’s easy to get tangled in all the details of a church project, especially at the beginning stages. So, the first important benefit of project management software is that it forces you to get specific about your goals–right from the start. To enter a project into your software, you are expected to state clearly what you intend to accomplish and when it will need to be completed. Then, along the way to completion, milestones will clearly mark the different stages of a project and tasks will be created, assigned, tracked, and completed. The software you choose might call these by different names, but essentially your project management software will collect and organize all the information about your project–so you can envision it and your teams can act on it.
"It's especially important for us to be in constant internal communication with other AVL team members so that we all know what items are coming up and what their roles are in the installation and commissioning of those items. Communication from monday.com handles all of that.”
—Andrew Ginn, Production Systems Engineer, The Church of the Highlands, Birmingham, Ala.
Andrew Ginn serves as Production Systems Engineer at The Church of the Highlands based in Birmingham, AL and finds that monday.com software addresses his team’s need to track the many issues associated with systems integration in a growing church. “In the past couple of years, we’ve become our own integrator and that has increased the need for us to know where we are in a project and be in constant communication with all the parties involved with the building processes. It's especially important for us to be in constant internal communication with other AVL team members so that we all know what items are coming up and what their roles are in the installation and commissioning of those items. Communication from monday.com handles all of that.”
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Andrew Ginn, Production Systems Engineer at The Church of the Highlands based in Birmingham, Ala., finds that monday.com software addresses his team’s need to track the many issues associated with systems integration in their growing church.
As an example of an integration project, Ginn offers that early in the process of a building project or launching a portable campus, planning starts with an idea of when the campus will open. “We use that as our baseline date,” he says. “From there we work backwards in the calendar and use our software to schedule all the events that need to happen to make that launch date. We input detail on the build for a permanent installation at around 12 weeks. That includes three weeks of prebuild in our warehouse and nine weeks of onsite installation, commissioning, programming, and campus team training. With monday.com, I can input that launch date and use dependencies to input dates of each item in the process. I can then go through and adjust for shortened work weeks for holidays or extremely busy times like Christmas or conference season. That provides the information to communicate with the construction team letting them know when we’ll need access to the building to complete the project. The software helps us create a very granular schedule fairly quickly and be flexible when construction dates shift.”
Ginn notes that because monday.com is completely customizable, there can be a learning curve, but that their training videos and resources available on YouTube make the introduction very simple. “When you start with monday.com, you also receive a few template “boards” that can be immediately customized to help you learn the capabilities of the software,” he adds. “And, you can choose to build things out as simply or as complex as you need. monday.com makes all of that easy.”
Software Helps Get Things Done
In the previous example, Ginn’s teams at The Church of the Highlands expertly use monday.com software to coordinate events and report progress on complex integration projects, while over at Chase Oaks Church in Dallas, TX, Paul Mitchell, the church’s busy Production Director, leverages the flexible design of ClickUp software to expedite the day-to-day team activities and get things done more efficiently.
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Paul Mitchell, Production Director at Chase Oaks Church in Dallas, leverages the flexible design of ClickUp software to expedite the day-to-day team activities and get things done more efficiently.
For the AVL teams that Mitchell leads, ClickUp puts all his teams’ tasks in one place along with all the information they need to complete them. “It’s a lot of information and checklists,” says Mitchell, “for team members who may be at varying skill levels. Of course, we have created fields to estimate how long a task will take, details of what they will need to do, and type of work, too. That allows us to track and sort content with tags and approve tasks, reschedule them, etc. But what we’ve found most helpful is how the software makes the information people need to do their jobs easily accessible.” Mitchell notes that the information about a task must be there when the task comes up. “People tend not to hunt for information,” he says, “so we put the process in front of them along with all the information they need to complete it. ClickUp lets us do that easily. If the instructions are there when teams need them, they are much more likely to do the task and more likely to do it right the first time.”
With ClickUp churches can post QR codes around the church with a volunteer sign up form. “Potential volunteers can pull up the form on their phone and it collects all the template information to set up onboarding for them.”
—Paul Mitchell, Production Director, Chase Oaks Church, Dallas, TX
Mitchell has had experience with several other project management offerings, but found that some tend to place advanced features, the ones that offer the most flexibility, behind paywalls. As a result, he has landed on ClickUp for its pricing, automation features, and third-party integration. One of the most useful automations he’s designed connects a QR code posted around the church with a volunteer form he designed in ClickUp. “Potential volunteers can pull up the form on their phone and it collects all the template information to set up onboarding for them,” he says. Other forms are used to collect reports after Sunday services. “These reports let us know what went well, what didn’t, and things that might be missing or confusing. Once we know the issues, they can easily be turned into objectives.” The forms are even designed to be private for the local campus pastor, so people can speak freely.
To make his job easier, Mitchell has created an automation that merges information about the activities of outside contractors. “Once the system has all the necessary information, it merges the details of their work with the MS-Word application to make invoices. This type of flexibility allows Mitchell to tailor ClickUp to his needs.
For Mitchell, ClickUp’s commitment to developing new features and integrations also sets them apart. “I want to know that as the information landscape changes, they will be ready with the tools and updates we need to take advantage of them.”
Better Communication
While we tend to think of project management as organized data held in a piece of software, church teams like those at Point Church in Cary, NC, are finding that an investment in project management brings teams and team members closer together. Colin Wells is the busy Creative Director for Pointe Church and uses Asana software to not only organize but communicate.
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Colin Wells, Creative Director for Pointe Church in Cary, North Carolina, uses Asana software to not only organize but communicate, "[With Asana] we can get notifications on our phones, iPads, even via social media."
Wells has created creative request workflows where requests self-populate fields where it can and even can auto-assign the request to a team. “Things work so much better when you get away from passing information around and 15-email deep threads on a request,” he says. “With a growing number of staff and volunteers to coordinate, as well as the church creating resources and tools to other churches, no two days look the same for us. So, it’s important for us to have a project management platform that is easily customizable.”
A common feature of most project management software is the ability to send notifications either initiated by team members or when the status of a task changes. A pastor at a remote campus can be notified when a support team will arrive, or when a hardware setup has completed. “In today’s world, people typically aren’t working in close proximity,” says Wells. “In fact, we find that we’re hardly in the same room at the same time anymore.” His teams’ use of project management software can often offset this lack of physical togetherness. “With people working different hours from home or in different locations, good communication around a project management system saves us from waiting for everyone to get together in order to make something happen. We can get notifications on our phones, iPads, even via social media.”
“...having a very busy schedule is a very solvable problem.”
—Colin Wells, Creative Director, Point Church, Cary, NC
Though Asana works well to meet Pointe Church’s small and medium size team needs, Wells has tried other project management approaches. “It’s well worth the time to find software that meets your particular needs and work style,” he advises, “and once you settle on something commit to using it.” He cautions that any project management application is only as good as how committed people are to using it. “While the basic features are easy, it pays to take time to show people how to use project management,” he says, as some people don’t take to it right away. “Project management shouldn’t be a hard sell, since everyone wants to be more effective and efficient.”
“I thought Basecamp 2 was simple to pick up, especially after having used other project management tools like Asana…”
—Nick Burt, Director of Communication, The Church at Rock Creek, Little Rock, AR
Nick Burt, Director of Communication at The Church at Rock Creek in Little Rock, AR, has worked with several visions of Basecamp. Basecamp 2 is still popular and will continue to be supported, but Basecamp 3 (which has evolved into Basecamp 4) along with its project management features provides significantly more in the way of integration with other applications. “With Basecamp 2, the projects work well with email to keep us all updated,” he says. “With our entire staff in Basecamp, we can comment directly on projects or respond to email notifications and comments are added to the projects–everything is saved in one place.”
Nick Burt, Director of Communication at The Church at Rock Creek in Little Rock, Ark., has worked with several visions of Basecamp, but he shares that “Basecamp 3 is impressive and seems to bring everything together.”
Burt notes that the flexibility of the website format seems to be the most valuable aspect of Basecamp 3 and above. In addition, the newer versions offer spaces for task lists, documents, and communications all within defined areas and based around a team or a project. “Basecamp 3 is impressive and seems to bring everything together,” he says. “I thought Basecamp 2 was simple to pick up, especially after having used other project management tools like Asana, where Basecamp 3 was a little more challenging to learn, simply because of how much it can do.”
Get Started
Perhaps the biggest advantage of project management software for churches is that it puts all the information about your projects in one place, a shared space where new projects are added, tasks with due dates assigned, files and information shared, statuses tracked, and where teams can communicate. Where once you had to wait for a meeting to assign tasks or approve them, now you can often get work started as a request arrives, even automate the process to communicate it to your staff or volunteers immediately.
Once you lose the email chains, sticky notes, and group text messages, everyone’s shared vision of a project keeps them working together toward common goals. And one of the best parts for churches is that many of their projects are recurring. Once you create a template for a recurring event, you can reuse and improve your project management efforts, customizing them to your teams’ needs.
As to getting people to commit to using project management software, Colin Wells at Pointe Church offers this advice: “There’s lots of information available. Try out software that fits your budget and how you work. Then, commit to using it yourself. If it makes you more efficient people will see the value. With the help of project management software, having a very busy schedule is a very solvable problem.”
