Church Project Management
I've recently come across the storm module. I'm exploring the ability to build a work group collaboration tool around this module along with the use of a variety of other tools. In a non-church effort, I've been researching all sorts of collaboration and project managment web services such as Basecamp, CentralDesktop, ACE, Sharepoint and some more. They've all had their issues in one area or another.
The flexibility of Drupal combined with storm may be able to bring us closer than any other options.
Anyway, it occured to me that churches would benefit from the same sort of distributed sort of solution we're looking for with strong communication possibilities like threaded discussions.
What sort of use cases would a church have for project management?
Event Coordination was the first idea to pop into my head. Building projects also struck me as a large project that might benefit from the ability of storm to nest tasks. So that brings me to my next question, what features would be needed for a church pm/collaboration tool?
It might also be interesting to know what churches use now for this and if the users are ever non-staff members.
Managing Church Projects
Hey flickerfly, Thanks so much for initiating this discussion.
My church has asked me to research options and recommend an approach for managing the work and decisions that flow through our Vestry Committee (that's the managing board/committee for an Episcopal Church). I've looked at a number of options, including BaseCamp, ActiveCollab, ProjectPier, dotProject and Drupal's own CaseTracker. The SaaS options are better in terms of simplicity and reliability, but I hate to create an island of data and activity separated from our main website, which I'm in the process of porting to Drupal.
I'd love to see a concerted effort here to polish a simple, reliable project/resource management solution that could complete with the SaaS offerings, but nicely integrate with the rest of a Drupal site, including OG, calendar, discussion, collaborative books, etc.
Erik
I've been thinking lately
I've been thinking lately that there is some simplicity gained by keeping to one tool, rather than using multiple SaaS options which has be looking more closely at Drupal for various things.
Anyway, I wonder if OG groups could be connected to the customer field of Storm. Then perhaps views could be created to show the projects for the various groups. OG integration in that way would certainly be interesting for churches. The module has the ability to rename things pretty easily using a simple array. You could simply rename "Organizations" to "Groups" and then have groups that want project management capability request you set it up for them.
Something that may need to be considered, permission to view projects, tasks and may be a little complicated. I'm sure there are other things that I'm forgetting too. :-)
What are the requirements your vestry committee has for this solution?
Josiah
Security!!!
I'd, also, investigate the Spaces and Context modules. Some good stuff has been done there for project collaboration. If someone was going to go down this route I expect the optimal solution for churches doesn't exist yet. I'd start with studying what churches do with their info and how they interact or would like to interact as a start. This is one of those cases where it's good to start with some research and a solid IA.
But, there is one huge and glaring issue that SaaS deals with very nicely. That issue is security. The ChMS solutions provide solid data storage security as well as connection security. They have security professionals who make sure it's real security. If a drupal (or other) solution in used it will lack that security unless there is an expert who knows what they are doing and is willing to keep up on it. This security is both in the connections to the server and the data itself.
If it were a simple project collaboration system I wouldn't see this as a big deal. The minute you put personal information or finances in a system like that it becomes a big deal.
Matt Farina
www.innovatingtomorrow.net
www.geeksandgod.com
www.superaveragepodcast.com
www.mattfarina.com
Bridging the gap
Thanks for pointing out those other modules. They are currently calling themselves alpha though. Are they okay to work with?
I'm not thinking so much a tool that would be used to convey personal data at this point though. More like discussion about what time the new service should start or what color the carpet should be, perhaps budget development.
I don't disagree that greater research into what this sort of things should look like is needed. It seems though, in a ministry context, what it should look like and what it is going to look like are drastically different and what it looks like from church to church is also rather significant in its differences. Uniformity is far from us. The ability to research this appropriately is also far from many due to availability of well trained people and/or money to pay them. How do we bridge this gap?
Security is certainly a concern that needs careful attention and one I'm concerned about. At the same time, I'm trying to figure out how to bring everyone in with the least number of hurdle to jump. They sure are difficult to bring together.
OG Integration
When I have tried integrating CaseTracker with OG, I did so by defining the Case/Project as an OG homepage. This way, Projects automatically have OG capability enabled.
With Storm, you could include Organization and Project content types among those enabled to be OG homepages. That way, OG capabilities would become inherent to those entities
Private client issue tracker using Project + OG Modules
I don't know if this fits the bill or not, but there's an interesting spin on using Project and OG Modules together over in the Issue tracking and Software Releases group. The Private client issue tracker using Project + OG Modules post is a site recipe that basically sets things up so that each project node is a Group Home Page. While it probably needs some custom glue to hold it together, it's an interesting concept.
It's probably overkill for the types of purposes that Flickerfly has mentioned, but might be an interesting starting point for other types of church project management.
Micah
phprojekt integrated into a drupal site
Ok I am kinda in the same boat as flickrfly. I am starting up a new website project for my self. www.lostministries.org We are an organization that at this point is concentrating on connecting people like us and others that are technically minded to assist missionaries and help to make their lives easier and save them money or help them reach more people. Lost stands for Laymen Offering and Serving Truth. Anyway my problem comes from the fact that I need a project management solution so when a missionary submits a request for assistance we can then create a project and have others join in when they want and get approval. I am planning on using phprojekt to manage everything. I like it's interface more then dotproject. I was also thinking of possible going with a ticket style system that would allow missionaries to enter a ticket from the drupal page and create a project in the project section. Then people can claim a ticket and get assigned to the project on the phprojekt side. Then the people will begin working and completing tasks. Well I want a way to integrate this into my drupal side by adding an updated list of whats happening with projects and each project might even get its own page that will list who is working on the project and what is being done. Kinda like a blog but it will just display task completion messages sent from phprojekt. Anyway I want a way to connect the two systems but not sure how. Anyone know of a ready made solution for this or am I gonna have to learn php? I'm an electrical engineer by the way so I get a lot of technical stuff and have a coding background (C mainly) so it's not impossible just hard :)
Thanks
Jonathan Bowen
www.lostministries.org