When I was working in the IT industry, one of my responsibilities was to manage the various projects we were working. We had software projects, hardware projects, web projects, and maintenance projects that I had to keep track of. In those days, the best we had was Microsoft Project. That worked pretty well but did not function well in a distributed environment.
As a pastor, I have found myself doing some of the same kinds of project management tasks. It is just that we don’t necessarily call them “projects”. They are called ministries, mission trips, retreats or some other ministry-sounding name. Yet so much of the processes and tasks of project management are appropriate for so many of our church ministries, trips and events.
If you are going to be efficient with those, why not consider implementing some project management software. And since your church, like mine, has a lot of lay involvement, why not put it out on the web so it can be used by everyone?
Collabtive is open source project management software. It is a PHP based (which means it can be run on almost any computer) project management system. Collabtive allows you to manage projects ministries by setting up different tasks and assigning them to different users. The progress of these tasks can then be tracked using the easy interface of the application. The administrator can add multiple users to the application and each user can access the interface through his/her browser. There’s no limit to the number of users that can work simultaneously on Collabtive. Although it doesn’t provide advanced features such as Gantt charts, it does provide for a very simple and efficient mechanism to keep track of your projects.
In order to use Collabtive, you need to have PHP support on your system(s). I mentioned last week how to put WAMP on your internal windows network server. However, if you want to make it available to those outside your internal network, find a good web host that runs LAMP and for $3.99/month or so, everyone has access to this powerful tool.
The software will come as a zip file. Extract the zip file, and place it in the appropriate place on the server. Then you just need to point your browser to the install.php file to launch the installer. Once installed, you are greeted with the following login screen.
Once you login with your credentials, you are greeted by what the Collabtive team call your Desktop. The Desktop shows you a list of all current projects, a tasklist, as well as a calendar showing your tasks and milestones.
Clicking on a project name takes you to the project page. This page is also called the Project Dashboard. The Project Dashboard consists of a calendar specific to a particular project. It also consists of a Timetracker that can be used to track the amount of time that you have spent working on the project. There is also an Activity Log, which contains a step-by-step listing of all the activities pertaining to the project.
This page also contains a number of icons at the top, which allow you to visit your Milestones page, review your Tasklists, access the Messaging system, as well as access the file storage for a particular project. There is also a User tab, which shows a list of all the users currently using the Collabtive system for a project.
The tasklist allows you to create tasks, which may be critical to the project. Each task can have an associated due-date and can be assigned to one or multiple users. These tasks, once completed, can simply be “finished” by clicking on the tick-mark next to them.
The Milestones can be looked upon as distinct phases in the project timeline. Each milestone may have a number of tasks associated with it. As and when tasks are finished, a status bar for the project under consideration keeps increasing on your Desktop.
The right hand side pane across all pages provides a search bar, a simple text-based calendar, and a list of users who are currently online. The search bar searches across tasks, milestones, as well as entire projects. Also, each user can fill out his/her profile page so that different team members have ways and means to contact one another.
Collabtive provides for a very elegant project management system. While it is not as power-packed as its commercial counterparts, it provides more than a decent feature set to keep track of all the tasks and milestones associated to your project, or um…ministry!
In the past few months, I have attempted to simplify my life. We live in such a consumption culture that life is very overwhelming. Letting go of the unnecessary is important, but difficult. And that does not even take into account the increasing popularity of social media.
