I am a few weeks into my new role here at Fellowship Church and I am having a blast! I am meeting lots of fantastic people on staff and within the Fellowship Creative team. I am extremely excited about being part of this team and about being apart of what God has in store in the very near future. God is about the blow to roof off Fellowship Creative! Unbelievable potential!

Now that things are rolling, one of the biggest needs to address right now is to shore up the lines of communication and some of the overall scheduling and request process. So over the past few months and weeks I have looked at many different project management/collaboration/task/ticket type of tools. I have come up with some criteria of what I want in a system and the needs that we have. I also have used some other project management tools in the past, like basecamp but I am looking for something with a few more features. But that being said I don’t want something as bulky and ugly as Microsoft Sharepoint.

Some of the things I really want are: Self Hosted, No monthly fees, Unlimited Users, Well Designed UI, Email integration & notification, Calendar, Task Assignments, Open API, Large Community

I eventually landed on ActiveCollab as the one stand-out winner. I seems to have just about everything I am looking for. There is a substantial one-time price tag for the initial software, but there isn’t a reoccurring monthly fee. One thing I wish ActiveCollab had out of the box is Gnatt charts. I am hoping to be able to find them through some type of plug-in.

So what tools are you using to manage your teams? Google Docs? Basecamp? Pen and Paper?

If you are a church techie or involved in church media/av/tech in any way at all then hopefully you already know about “Church Production Magazine“.  And if you don’t… Then shame on you. =)  “Church Production” is a great resource for churches of all sizes and covers all things associated with production houses of worship. With church-specific coverage of audio, video, lighting and duplication, Church Production Magazine is presented in an editorial context that is designed as a reference for churches to use in their decision-making process. CPM has become a leading resource for news, new product announcements, trends, product reviews, tours and installations in facilities across the country. It’s very good stuff and I would definitely encourage you to use this resource.

CPM is also one of the major presentors and parties responsible for “WFX – Worship Facilities Expo”, an educational conference and tradeshow designed to bring together teams of decision makers from churches around the world. It’s a great event to take your tech teams too and dream.

I recently did an article for BlackMagic Design that was featured in CPM this month on the production setup at National Community Church and how we leveraged the products from BlackMagic Design to make it all happen.  My apologies for the article being a little dated.  It states that NCC is 4 locations, and leaves out the latest location Kingstowne, Which lauched after this article was written.

Here is the link and hope you enjoy! – http://churchproduction.com/go.php/article/8590

It’s been a crazy week getting moved out from our home in DC. Unreal how many little details pop up during a move. But I made it to DFW airport last night at 2:00am. My flight was pushed back a bunch due to weather.

Excited to be here and get started on this new chapter of life.