Cause to Pause

Don’t get too excited. This may or may not be a weekly event. However, I wanted to pimp out Jason Lee and a brilliant idea he has been working on.

If you are user of ACS ChMS (There’s 50-60,000 churches right there.) and use Outlook via Exchange w/ Active Directory, Global Address Book, Jason has a deal for you! He has a couple of blog posts on it here and here. That is where you will find the technical nuts and bolts.

Think of this as the contact information version of your file server. What happens when an employee saves a document to their local C drive? It becomes their work in the “shadow lands” and your problem when the drive fails. They think “mine” and you think “oh, man”.
If they store it on the Public drive, everyone feels secure. There’s back up, there’s redundancy. There’s access. Life is good. With the right education and incentive, there’s really no need to store to the local drive any longer.

This would give you Exchange folks the same option for emails and addresses. Yes, we all know if people would just use the database, or AccessACS this would all be a moot point. Points are seldom moot in the real world.
If all the contact data that is stored in your ChMS isthen pushed into that Outlook client that your staff can’t live without, it eliminates the need (and the habit) of maintaining Outlook contacts. Especially when it will be updated FOR them! Just think- Everyone working off the same email and address lists. Always. Without coercion or strife. Visualize world peace.

Jason summed it up well:
“If this were in production, I won’t get any more emails from attendees saying “I have told you to update my email but staff continue to email my old email address”.

The downside to this is it is still WAY preproduction. Just “proof of concept”. Which is engineering speak for “We made it work, but we need some cash to make it work well enough so people won’t try to kill us later when it breaks.” How much cash? Not nearly enough to make Dave Ramsey yell “Sell the car!”

Jason had several comments on the usefulness of this. With the right amount of “buy-in” or proclaimed need, this project could move to the front burner. For more info or questions related to groups, etc. hit the blog links above or email: Jason.Lee “at” nwoods “dot” org.

Yes, I know. It’s supposed to be Shameless Plug Friday.

1. Jason Powelland CITRT. Monday night I was in a Communications Committee meeting and one of the goals was to explore the idea of having the meetings via web conference. There are a lot of reasons to do this- less trips by car (greener), volunteers can save probably an hour by time they drive to church, drive back and the associated getting ready to go, etc. The next day I posted a tweet looking for “free or dirt cheap” solutions. Jason retweeted and later put a page up on the CITRT.org site. Thus demonstrating the power of community.
I could spend several weeks searching for different solutions, trying them out, etc. Or I could just check into the wiki page every so often and let the discussion hash it out. Hmmm….
2. My buddies Scott S. and Kevin A. who keep noodling me to get back on the bike. The spirit is willing, but the time clock is weak. Gotta find time for that. (you can and should follow @kevinabbate on twitter. You’ll feel like a fat, lazy, out of shape, middle aged tree slug, but Kevin is a great guy, so it’s all good. He’s definitely a motivator when it comes to being in shape.)
3. Michael Hyatt. CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishers. I just added him to my blog roll. His blog consistently has great information on time management, staying connected via technology, leadership, etc. There is a good one here about twitter and another good one hereabout managing email. Great resource and certainly worth following.

Ever get a volunteer, give ‘em some direction, then when an “oops” happens the volunteer blames themself for messing up and you blame yourself for not training them right?
Yeah. Me neither.
But the real question comes in “What was the goal?”
Ok, for just a minute, get down off the “Ten Leadership Principles of Successful Team Development Through Personal Excellence” train and remember that the most important word is “personal”. The only thing that really matters is people. We are all just dealing with people. Shoot, some of even are people!
If you have read this blog for any length of time (and I thank the both of you), you know I have a slant toward expectations. Giving and getting. But sometimes, maybe, just sometimes it isn’t about fulfilling expectations. Maybe sometimes it is just about “being”.

For the last six weeks my small group and I have been wading through the book of Galatians. The whole book is about grace verses law. Living a life led by the Spirit verses living one of fulfilling expectations that are beyond reach. This letter is unlike any of Paul’s other ones. This isn’t Paul the “hang in there guys, I believe in you, me and my buddies all say ‘Hi’, let’s have lunch, buh-bye”.
This Paul the Angry Blogger.
What is he so honked off about? Somebody has been trying to get the Galatians to start worrying about fulfilling expectations that they have no business even thinking about. And once they got on the “expectation fulfillment train”, there was no stopping it. Their focus shifted from one of gratitude and “glad that is over” to one of…well…..OUCH!

I don’t have any great axiom to close this post out and tie those two points up with a bow. It all seems incongruous on the surface.
But I will say that you know how you really didn’t care about that little “oops” I mentioned? Your volunteer probably didn’t care about being undertrained either. Probably never entered their mind.
But if either one of you lets the other start down the “should have done…” road, you are both in trouble. You are BOTH putting yourself under a burden that really doesn’t exist. That’s a line of thinking that certainly won’t end at ” love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self control”.