Simplifying Structures
Posted by nathan on 16 May 2007 | Tagged as: New Hope stuff.
This week at New Hope I finally had the opportunity to introduce some simplification to our structure for how we schedule events.
Previously, this were the steps an event planner had to do (more or less)
1. Talk to Person 1 to see if the date is okay (if yes, they got final approval at this point)
2. Talk to Person 2 (Pastor in charge) to see if the event is okay
3. Fill out paperwork and turn it in to Person 1. (but if not done, it’s okay, your event was already approved in step one!)
4. Talk to Person 3 for setup (optional)
5. Talk to Person 4 for communications (optional)
6. Talk to Person 5 for accounting assistance (optional)
Now, this is the new structure:
1. Fill out paperwork (two pages–second page is for optional services) and turn it in to anyone in the office.
Simple, eh? Although it is much, much more simple for our volunteers, it does put some extra work on the office staff, but the structures benefits are huge:
1. It is simple for our extremely valuable, unpaid event planners
2. ALL our staff now has complete access to the whole master church calendar.
3. Support services (like communications, accounting, setup) now get job assignments from one place (the system) instead of every event planner via phone, or hand-written note, or E-mail, or face-to-face. Meaning, less opportunities to drop the ball. In other words, I no longer have 30 different bosses telling me what to do. They submit it to the system, and the system tells me what’s up. Hallelujah! That has been a thorn in my side for my more than six years in my current position. Hallelujah! I can hear the angels now.
Are there things in your structures you can improve on? Maybe you could be more efficient running errands, as Carma mentioned yesterday. Think outside the box. It doesn’t have to be like it always was just because that’s the way it always was.
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