A ChMS Journey

Over the last several months, Clif Guy of The Appian Way has been documenting bits and pieces of The United Methodist Church of the Resurrection's journey towards finding a new ChMS to handle their needs. As part of their IT and Web teams, Clif offers a lot of interesting insight and commentary on the process of making a decision. They are a larger church, but many of the points he makes can be applied to any search.

They start off with the decision to move to a new ChMS, where he hits on one of the decisions on installations and types of ChMS's we wrote about earlier this month. As you can see, they are discussing their options against a set of products they are considering. There's no need to have everything you want narrowed down before you start looking, even if sometimes it does expand your search further. Besides, if you have a strict set of criteria going in, there's also the chance you won't be able to find anything that suits your needs.

Then Clif gets into discussing the goals they have for transitioning to a new system. As you can see, there isn't too much specific about it, yet is does put together ideas on what they want to accomplish. This may be most important of all, because it's helping provide focus for the leadership group that is making the decision about a new piece of software.

Later on, Clif gets into discussing the evaluation criteria they have for a ChMS, where they discuss different features and requirements they have. As you can see, he includes a number of other criteria besides features, like cost, reliability and the reputation of the selling company. After all, it's not much good to get even a great piece of software if the company isn't around a year or two later to support or upgrade it.

Lastly, Clif lets us in on the finalists they've chosen for their new ChMS. At this time, he hasn't brought up a final decision, but I'm sure it's coming soon.

Now, I'm not endorsing whatever ChMS Clif and the team at Resurrection chose to implement, but I wanted to provide an example of the process of the selection. And, if you notice the dates on Clif's posts, it's not a quick decision. They've been discussing this for over 2 months now. Don't be in a rush, or you might miss something.

Thanks Clif for documenting Resurrection's process! It's great insight for us all, especially if we've not been through a similar process before.