Church Production's Joseph Cottle sits down with Church of the Highlands' project manager, Justin Firesheets for his tips for tackling major church overhauls.
Maybe you’re the type of tech director who always dreams of the day when you’ll get the go-ahead to overhaul the audio system. Or maybe you’re the guy who is dreading the lighting upgrade. Big installation projects can be exciting and intimidating. Justin Firesheets has been down this road many times as a project manager at Church of the Highlands in Birmingham, Alabama. The multisite megachurch includes dozens of campus locations, and is the second-largest church in the United States. Firesheets joined the Church Production Podcast recently for a conversation about project management. From that conversation evolved these Top 12 Do’s and Don’ts for Project Planning.
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Top 12 Do’s and Don’ts for Project Planning
1. Don't put pressure on yourself to be the smartest person in the room.
You should never feel like you have to have all the answers by yourself for everything, especially if it's something you've never done before. So, if there's a project going on, the best thing you can do early is get as many voices of wisdom and knowledge and experience involved as soon as possible because if you've never done it before, you don't know what you don't know.
You don't know how you should think about something or what you should consider or what type of margin you need to plan or how long it's reasonable to expect or how much it should cost or what the learning curve is going to be. Sometimes you just don't know those things until you've been in it, and it's one thing to have knowledge.
Read forums and do podcasts and all that and learn about the technology piece, but wisdom is applied knowledge and until you've been through it and you've lived it, you just don't have the wisdom that comes from the experience of having sat in the seat and dealt with a project.
2. Do bring other resources to the table that can help you.
Are there integrators or consultants who can help us see the technology gremlins that we're not going to know about and can help us solve these problems instead of us trying to do simple trade craft on our own installed? Do we need to get an electrician involved? Do we need to get an acoustician involved if it's a big audio thing in our sanctuary to help us manage acoustics and reverberation and reflection and things that we've just never thought about before?
I understand that especially if it's a church with limited resources. I understand the perspective of wanting to figure out how much we can do in house because we're going to save money, but sometimes there's no price you can put on experience because I can try to figure it all out on my own or we can bring in people who have experience and can potentially save us a lot of headache and stress and anxiety and maybe in the long run it saves us money because it helps us avoid pitfalls and disasters and mistakes that we would've made on our own had we not brought in somebody with experience.
3. Do identify in-house stakeholders that need to speak into this process.
Who are the people using this multipurpose room where we're trying to figure out, do we hang a projector? Do we just do a big TV? Do we have it as a plug and play system? Do we take the step and put in some kind of a Q-Sys thing or a Crestron thing or a stream deck that can help automate some stuff?
Who all is going to use this room and can I ask what they're going to use it for and what their potential pain points are going to be and what are the use cases? So that as we look at designing this from a technology standpoint, I'm not thinking about it just from my role as a production guy or in maybe somebody's case as a network person, I'm not just looking at it from the technology angle, but I'm looking at it from the end user standpoint.
Sometimes there's value in talking to the student ministries people and the kids people and the small groups people and whoever else might touch this space to figure out how it would make sense in their world to function. That's going to inform me a lot.
4. Don’t use a company unless you have friends or peers that can vouch for their level of quality, trustworthiness and support.
So, if I'm at a small church, doesn't matter what part of the country, I need to do my due diligence to learn more about that company. It's somebody that my pastor stumbled across at a pastor's conference and they struck up a conversation and said, “Oh, I think maybe we should use these people.” That's great, but who can we talk to that has used them before? Can this company provide us a list of references and we can look at some of those people to see if there's a familiar name? Maybe there are churches in our community that I can reach out to and ask, “Hey, who did you guys use for a certain project? What company was it? Do you have somebody that you could refer me to?” So now I can maybe bring somebody to the table and I can tell my pastor, “Hey, church such and such down the street, this is who they used and they really like that.”
5. Don’t just hire someone because they go to your church.
Something churches do a lot of is, “There's a guy in our church that does these types of things. He's going to do this project for us because he's a member of our congregation and it's going to save us money because he's going to cut us a break on the equipment or the install or he's going to pull the cable cheaper or he knows a guy,” or whatever else. That's great from a relationship standpoint, but I would really caution people from doing that. You never want to be the biggest project that somebody has ever done, honestly. You don't want them learning on the job on your project because this might be the biggest thing you ever do. This might be the only sound system upgrade that your church does for the next 20 years, and so that's great that maybe they can save you money by doing some stuff, but maybe it's not the right way to consider that particular project.
6. Even if you’re a bigger church with experienced people, maybe still don’t DIY.
As a church gets larger and a staff gets bigger it's easy to think, “Well, maybe we can do some of this ourselves as a staff. We've got technical experience and the church is already paying us. It saves money from having an integrator or another subcontractor come do some of this work. We could do this ourselves.” And that's probably going to be true to a large extent. The thing to consider though on the flip side is if I spend my time on this project, what are the things that are getting neglected because we are focusing on this project and we don't have the time and the margin right now to do other things, so there's always going to be a tradeoff.
It may not be an apples-to-apples bottom line of dollar amount. Sure, we might be saving money from outsourcing it, but there's still a cost of what price we're now having to pay because we're doing this stuff on our own in-house, but it's biblical to examine the cost before you start something. So, maybe you factor that in and say, “You know what? In this case the cost is worth it. It's still worth us doing this work ourselves internally because of the savings, and this isn't a busy season right now. We can afford to miss out on other things.”
The other thing to consider is that when we start doing things on our own, that means we have to handle all the troubleshooting on our own. We have to handle all the commissioning on our own. We have to handle the after sales support on our own. If there's a problem during install, we now become the ones that have to figure that out with the manufacturer or maybe find more money to solve that problem. That's a benefit sometimes of having an integrator involved. I get to put my head on the pillow at night knowing that if there's an issue, I'm not the one that has to figure out how to solve the problem. Somebody else is getting paid to solve that problem. I don't have to worry about it. It's their job to figure out how to replace the dead widget with another one and still have us be in a position to have a service on Sunday. That's one thing I don't have to stress about. Maybe that peace of mind is a price worth paying, and so yes, we may be a larger church with more staff and more competence and more skillset, but again, there's a cost. It's worth considering with larger projects that may be more generational type projects.
7. Do know your gear.
The number one thing for everybody to try to do when you're writing a big check is you have to have a lot of confidence in the equipment that you're going with. It's one thing for the integrator to be confident in it, but it's another thing entirely for you to know it's what you need and it fits your space. It's not that you're being sold something, it's that you're choosing something that's a good fit for you. And so being able to demo high-value equipment is critical. Again, this may be the only thing your church installs for 20 to 25 years. You want to make sure that it really stinking works in your room.
Maybe it's not a PA that's going to last that long, but maybe you're spending $200,000 on an LED wall or you are a smaller organization and you're cobbling together money to put in a digital infrastructure and you're moving to Dante and you're trying to find the right type of audio console to go with it and how's that going to work for the right PA? Which anybody that read the June issue of Church Production online would know that you guys are walking through that Dante process, right? https://www.churchproduction.com/magazine/how-to-transform-your-audio-infrastructure-a-guide-to-avoip-/ So, make sure you're reading the magazine – not just listening to the podcast. But yes, listen to the podcasts. ;-)
8. Do get hands on with equipment before you buy.
I need to see if I can get the manufacturer to bring in demo equipment that we can put our hands on so that the volunteers that are going to be mixing on this console can speak into whether they feel comfortable navigating the thing. We need to bring in the lights that we're looking at doing for a front wash that we're moving to these LED fixtures. We need to make sure that they're bright enough to offer punch and they're going to look good on our cameras. We need to bring in samples of the LED wall to make sure that they look good on our stage as a backdrop and we don't have moiré or banding because of how they are captured on our cameras for IMAG or for online streaming. These are things that I have to be mindful of and maybe my integrator knows of another church that has done a similar project. Take a field trip and go see what it looks like in another space and we can go hear those speakers in somebody else's room that's of a similar size. I have to make sure that I'm comfortable with this technology when we're writing a big check or making a big ACH payment into someone else's bank account. We've got to make sure that we're very confident in the equipment that we're putting in that it really is going to be worth a generational investment.
9. Do your project backwards.
First you have your deadline and then you need to subtract out margin for testing or volunteer training. Then you need to back out in front of that X amount of time to do the actual install work, whether it's a projector or a sound system or whatever, and you're going to have to have a little bit of margin in there because things always take longer than we think they're going to because stuff pops up, right? Well then before that, I need to add in a window for shipping and delivery for it to actually get on site and I need to make sure that that is long enough so in case there's a shipping delay, it's not messing up the rest of the schedule, so they tell me it's going to be here in six weeks. Maybe I should plan eight weeks well before it ships.
Now I need to back up even a little bit more for how long does it take to process the paperwork on our end to approve a purchase and get the PO approved and actually go through the administrative process. Maybe we have a finance board that has to approve things that are over a certain dollar amount. Okay, well, now I need to back up in front of that because it's going to take a certain amount of time for us to even go through the quoting process and settle on what exactly it is we want to do.
We're probably going to go back and forth a couple times regarding feature set or the left-handed version versus the right-handed version, or do we want it in black or purple or whatever. Or do we want two of these or do we want three of these? Should we get a spare? Should we not get a spare? And so now where I had just been looking at my calendar only having one date on there for the go live date, I now have several other major milestones throughout the course of the project that are going to determine whether we get off the rails or not.
10. Do expect the unexpected and scope creep.
Sometimes I think it's easy to start a project without thinking about all the different steps involved. We don't think about how much time it's going to take to do some research and then get quotes and then make up our mind on what we actually want or we underestimate the shipping turnaround because maybe the manufacturer doesn't have it in stock. It's a build to order item and it's going to take a while. Everybody saw that during COVID, right? Yamaha could get you a jet ski, but they couldn't get you an audio console. So, there are issues all over the place that we kind of had to adapt to, and so now I'm not looking at one date. I might be looking at six or seven that I have to manage in order to keep this project on track.
So that's why it's so important to break a project down in stages. Vision creep is a major part of every project, or at least it's a threat in every project because we may have clarity when the project starts, what we're trying to accomplish, but now as we start seeing what technology can do, and now the stakeholders start speaking into things a little bit more and there's somebody else has some ideas about things.
Our vision started at a two on the dial going from left to right and now, through all these other generations of conversation and dreaming and what if, now it's all the way up at a six and so now we have veered off course from what we were originally trying to accomplish.
Maybe our budget has strayed off course and/or our timeline has strayed off course, so now we can end up investing a whole lot more into this until we hit the brakes and say, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa! Hang on here! Let's reset on what exactly we're trying to do or accomplish in the first place. Are we still meeting our goals or have we allowed the vision to drift and that's getting us in the ditch and we need to reset and course correct?
11. Do consider, check and update the church calendar.
We need to make sure we understand the seasons in the church that are very busy or high priority and make sure those are the big rocks that we are planning around because those things are the lifeblood of a ministry. Those are the really big things we have to make sure happen. We can't get distracted. Christmas is coming, and so we have to make sure that those things stay the priority. Also, projects during the summer when school is out, maybe you're a church that all of your summer events happen in one month. You've got your youth camp and you've got your VBS and it's a crazy busy month in June or July, but the other one of those months isn't as busy. Maybe that can be a project season where we are able to put a lot of midweek time into an upgrade or a project or an install or whatever else.
Breaks in the calendar are also a great time to put extra investment in our volunteer teams. Maybe this is a time that we can do team appreciation events and we can have a cookout or a barbecue. Maybe we can do a social outing and bowling or invite everybody up to the church for a movie night or a Nerf gun war or whatever. Maybe it's a time that we can do some additional training with our volunteers. We don't have any midweek events for the next couple of weeks because it's summer, so let's use the next three or four Thursdays or Tuesdays or whatever as a way to bring our volunteers in and show them some new features in Pro Presenter or the digital audio console we have, or whatever the case may be, so I can invest in my people when normally it's so frenetic that we're just go, go, go.
Another thing that needs to happen on the calendar is regular maintenance and cleaning and upkeep of our equipment and our spaces. There are projectors that should have filters cleaned and lamps replaced. There are microphones that should maybe have the grills replaced or cleaned. There are drum heads that need to get replaced, and there are always things that we need to do to make sure that we're optimizing the systems that we already have. That's a piece of stewardship is how I am taking care of what I already have?
I have to make sure I'm not so enamored by the new things that I want or that I wish I had, but I'm thinking about how do I do a good job taking care of what's already been given to me to make sure it lasts as long as it can. I need to have time in the calendar over the course of the year to do those types of things.
Let me also give my volunteers six-weeks notice before we're going to be doing new equipment training, so that they can pick a day that works for them and they can come in and prioritize it. Let me make sure my staff knows when we're all going to be traveling to this other campus to do all this cleanup work or whatever the case may be so we can plan on it. It blows my mind sometimes how reactionary we can get, and then before you know it, you look up and it's been six weeks and it's just lather, rinse, repeat, and we've missed opportunities to improve our environment because we weren't strategic with it.
12. Don’t forget to take care of yourself!
Am I making sure that I am taking advantage of that season and going on vacation myself? Sometimes can I come in late or leave early or have lunch with my kids? There are seasons when it's so busy that you maybe unintentionally neglect yourself.
Check out early and go play a round of golf or take a day off and go to the park with your kids and your dog. We get so busy that we violate the Sabbath way too easily, and we need to make sure that we're willing to course correct and allow our minds and bodies to be refreshed during those seasons, but thinking this way is intentional.
I have to have time during the year when I'm sitting down looking at my calendar saying, when are the busy seasons? When are the slow seasons? How do I need to act and react accordingly? What do I need to plan? When do I need to go ahead and schedule vacation? We can always come up with excuses why we can't do vacation. “Oh, there's too much stuff going on.” No, no, no! I need to plan my vacation before it gets busy. Let me look at the calendar a couple months ahead of time and figure that out.
