Admin Lessons - Planning

"If you fail to plan, you plan to fail", it's an old adage but a true one especially when it comes to achieving a vision, goal or even just a one-off event.

My job as the administrator at my church gives me a key part in leading the planning of our church events, ministries and strategy. We normally do this a year in advance, producing an annual plan for the church running from September to August.

I believe there are three key factors you need to focus on to be effective in planning - Aim, Process, Review

AIM
The clearer you are about where you want to get to - your vision - the easier it is to get there. Sounds such a simple common sense thing to do, but so rarely is it done.

So before you start to plan ask, "What do you want to achieve?". Whatever time frame you are planning for, do you have a vision of what success will look like if you get there. Another way of thinking about this is to imagine you are writing a summary looking back over what has happened in achieving your vision. What can you envisage writing about? If your vision is to see your small groups increase from 10 to 20 then looking back after getting to 20 groups we might see the highlights were the:
- small group training course(s) that successfully identified the leaders,
- the successful launching of new groups,
- the focus and priority of small groups in church life.

Developing activities, actions and strategies is easier if you can picture where you want to get to and start to visualise what you will need to do, consider, think about to get there.

PROCESS
Both the development of vision and the planning process itself will benefit from the widest possible inclusion of people.

Over the years the steps I have used to plan have changed and developed but the process I have found best is in three parts as follows:
Session 1 - very much sets the scene, paints the big picture, and generates ideas and actions
Session 2 - is the nitty gritty of details and choices
Session 3 - reviews the process and agrees the detail of output and actions

Session 1
Gather together as many as is possible of elders, ministry leaders and staff (ideally you have people covering evangelism, kids work, youth work, small groups, worship, social action, men, women, teaching, etc.)
Over the course of 2-4 hours you will:
- Review our long term goals and vision and what God has been saying to us?
- Decide on your priorities for this year?
- Agree the principles of planning- e.g. no more than X sat events in a month
- Generate list of ideas* for activities, events and actions to help us achieve our priorities (and vision)
- Map these ideas onto a year plan

* we can and do use last years plan and activities as a start point
NB - the output of Session 1 is written up and circulated for reading before Session 2

Session 2
Again as many as possible of the people from the first session should attend this next session.
This session should last about 1-2 hours where you will:
- Review the notes / big picture plan from the first session
- Work through the details:
   > are there any date clashes?
   > does it actually help our priorities / vision?
   > can we deliver it? over crowded diaries / not enough resources?
   > does it meet our planning principles?
- Check if you have missed anything? A chance to add other bright ideas!

Session 3
A final session reviewing changes from the previous session, probably just a core team needed for this part of the process.
This session will review:
- dates and activities.
- communication of plans - see my previous post on communication
- action list
- agree review points for the plan over the course of the year

REVIEW
If you have a goal and a plan of how to move towards achieving that goal. It is madness if you wait until you've done everything or got to the end of your plan to see if it has been successful.

W Edwards Deming the man who is generally credited with helping the revival of the Japanese economy after World War II taught people, amongst many other things, about the PDCA cycle, Plan - Do - Check - Act.
After planning and starting to work on or towards your goal we should study how we are doing. Is it working? Do we need to refine things? This leads to action which is planned and so the cycle continues.

Does this sound too business like for a church? What if I was to replace the word Check with the word Listen - listen to God, listen to what any measures may be telling you, listen to what the church says (the wisdom of the crowd).

How often you review things probably depends on how long you are planning for. If you are planning for the year Sept-Aug, review in Jan/Feb then again around Easter. The Easter review could immediately precede or be part of the start of planning for the next year.

In summary...
No system or process for planning is perfect and can it always be improved. But being systematic whilst being open to change gives you a framework to achieve your vision, God willing :-). I would love to hear your thoughts and comments on planning, what works, your struggles, what you think of my structure, and anything else.

Admin Lessons - Communication

I work as a Church Administrator which means I have a wide range of roles that I oversee.  One of the areas I am responsible for is communication.

Communication in any organisation (or indeed in any relationship) can always be improved, in fact most of the time the communication we do is purely information transfer - sending out details of what is going to happen with the hope that if we say it enough times and in enough different ways it will be absorbed and understood.

This is the reality of organisational communication.  Occasionally we review, reflect and ask people how we are doing, for those of you reading this who are part of my church why don't you tell me what you think - click here for a quick survey - but read the rest of this post first!

When I look at communication and the process of communication for an organisation I find Kipling's six honest men helpful,

"I KEEP six honest serving-men (They taught me all I knew)

Their names are What and Why and When

And How and Where and Who."

1. Why communicate?
At its simplest level people need to know what's going on and so we need to tell people!
But more fundamentally in an organisation communication should help to serve the vision. Great leadership provides a compelling and well communicated vision which can be easily grasped and connected to the everyday activities which help move the organisation towards achieving that vision.

2. Where do you communicate? and...
3. How do you communicate?
These two questions refer to the channels of communication that are employed.
This simple answer to this should be - in as many places and using as many methods as possible, the following diagram tries to sum up the main methods that we use in our church.
(The size of each items is my guess at how effective each method is in terms of reach and usefulness)

4. Who communicates?
The really short answer is Me (see the first paragraph)! In reality everybody on staff and in leadership in our church is involved in one way or another in the communication process.
But even wider than that everybody in the whole organisation in involved in communication, they may not generate the initial communication but when they recieve it they can pass it on. If we fall into a culture of not telling people news we think they may need to know then we are not really looking out for each other. This will never be a primary means of communication rather a safety net provided by our mutual community.

5. When to communicate?

Different situations demand different timescales but the further ahead you can communicate is usually the better.

It is good to be able to plan to communicate, that is having thought out what you want to do then have the time to think about how and when you need to communicate this. More often than not communication has to happen immediately because the situation hasn’t been planned out in advance. Sometimes we have to react to a situation - a bereavement, a sudden opportunity or a cancellation – but more often than not we could have foreseen these events but we have failed to allow ourselves the time necessary to plan not only the event but the communication of the event. Planning is another key element to great leadership which moves an organisation towards its vision – my next article on Admin Lessons will be on planning.

6. What to communicate?

This in a lot of ways is the most important question. You can have all the above perfect but if your content is poorly formulated, full of errors or just difficult to understand then you are probably wasting your time. We need to put ourselves in the place of the person who is reading or hearing our message for the first time. I may have worked on this idea or message for days, weeks or even months so I know exactly what I am talking about but will the person who is hearing it understand or will they be left with a series of questions?

Whenever I produce anything to send out to people I give it to someone else with the question “Does this make sense?” because if it doesn’t I have failed.

So could I and my organisation do better at communication? The answer is YES. I know that we can do better but I also know that I have improved over the years.

What about your communication, what are your areas of weakness? Take a look at the following questions and hopefully they will help point out where you need to work on to really improve your communication.

Why? Is the importance of communication clear and at the top of the list?

Where & How? Are there some new channels of communication you need to develop? Are there some existing ones that need to be revamped or stopped?

Who? What is your flow of communication like? Is there a clear process and system? Do people share news and information with one another?

When? How well are you planning your communication? Esp. For major changes or events do you have time to think what you need to communicate and to be able to develop it with plenty of time before it is needed?

What? Is what you produce any good? How would you know? Do you have someone who has real skill and talent in writing\communication to review your work, esp. before you issue it? For major changes or events do you review your communication with someone who is not involved in the situation to check it “makes sense”?

And don't forget to let me know what you think of our communication in the Community Church, click here to go to the survey.