We are now live on our new Arena Church Management System!
As we prepared for our rollout, we knew we needed to find a way to make certain that the ministry teams at all our campuses had the support they needed to hit the ground running on our new system. Yes, we did spend time training and preparing, but the real test is when the system is live and you have to get your job done because Sunday is coming!
We ended up setting up “Triage Rooms” at each campus for our first two weeks of production on Arena. Yes, we realize that for many of you this brings to mind images of M*A*S*H and a bloody operating room, but we called them that anyway! 
We found a central location that was convenient for the teams at that campus, stocked those rooms with candy and snacks, and manned each one with members of our team so that we could provide face-to-face support. We do have some unique challenges because of the size of our staff and the fact that we are separated geographically, so being onsite allowed us to provide a personal touch, which went a long way to providing a comfort level to our ministries. We didn’t know how effective this would be, but it ended up being a huge success!
A lot of work certainly went into getting us to this point, and we look at this as just the beginning. Now that we’ve built the foundation (yes, we still have a few “punch list” items to take care of), we are excited about adding on to that foundation to provide new tools, sites, and systems to the ministries at our campuses. This is one of the (if not the) biggest technology projects we’ve ever undertaken, and using these triage rooms helped us provide the support and customer service our ministry partners needed to be able to confidently do their jobs using the new system.
July 7th, 2010 at 11:41 am
Our pastors have visited NP previously and were definitely impressed. I am helping with a ChMS needs assessment and looking at Arena and F1 primarily.
Hoping you might be willing to chat about your previous/current state regarding ChMS, and your process for selecting.
Our chuch is much smaller at about 1000-1500, but our pastors like many of the things you are doing at NP.
July 8th, 2010 at 7:34 am
Thanks, Mitch -
We’ll be glad to chat with you in person about your specific questions - I’ve sent you an email with our contact info. We’re going to try to start answering some of these questions on the blog as well. Stay tuned…