Plan the celebration too

The next time you have a large project that takes months to plan and execute, be sure to plan the celebration too. For the Arena implementation project we recently completed, we planned two celebration events. First, we invited all staff to an ice cream social in the Student Center on the afternoon of go live. [...]

Arena communications plan

Subtitle: "Another lesson in how difficult it is to communicate effectively" Regular readers of this blog know that Church of the Resurrection went live on the Arena church management system earlier this week.  Travis (the project manager) and I knew that frequent and effective communication would be critical for the success of such a large [...]

Chris Randolph joins the BBQ tour

Chris Randolph, lead support tech for Arena joined us yesterday and today for the immediate post go-live support period.  In accordance with our Shelby-Resurrection tradition, we had to take him for barbecue.  (We also had to memorialize it with the traditional bad cell phone picture taken by a well-meaning waitress with an unsteady hand!)  This [...]

Arena go-live party

Jason Gant, Director of Student Ministries (youth pastor) picks his toppings   Brent Messick, Managing Executive Director of Operations (my boss) Debi Nixon, Executive Director of Adult Discipleship is EXCITED! Specially trained "Arena Facilitators" each received a fuzzy monkey to make it easy for their fellow staff to identify them Andrew Conard, Congregational Care Pastor [...]

Arena go-live

Today is the day we go live on Arena.  We’ve been planning and preparing for this day since August 2007, which is 9+ months.  To track our progress, check out: Clif: www.twitter.com/clifguy Ian: www.twitter.com/cyberentomology War room live: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/clif-guy-cam Time line starting now: Shelby V5 goes down Backup V5 database Change permissions in V5 to limit [...]

Next stop on the Shelby-Resurrection BBQ Tour

Ben Lane from Shelby is here for our Arena go-live tomorrow.  Continuing our long-standing tradition, we had KC barbecue for lunch.  Despite the crude and blurry cell phone pictures, I think you can get an idea of the experience.  Yum! L to R: Linda Ronsick (data quality), Ian Beyer (cyberentomology), Matt Bradshaw (bit shepherd), Ben [...]