How much value do we place on our staff members time? How much time is wasted on IT projects in YWAM?
I've been thinking for quite a while, since around the time I wrote about Outsourcing IT in YWAM, about how little we sometimes value the time of our staff. Quite often we would rather spend 6-months on a project rather than spend money on an already proven solution. If I were running a business with this sort of philosophy I would be shelling out lots of money in wages, but because we are a volunteer organization we don't often take the value of our "time" into account when we do a cost analysis on a project.
Our current Contact Management System (CMS), or Customer Relationship Management (CRM), solution is a classic example of this that I have been overseeing.
So far we have spent about 5-months of development on the project, one person putting in about 10-hours per week (DTS work-duty student), another .Net programmer putting in about 20-hours per week and a third person putting in about 5 - 10 hours per week. This is to customize our new installation of Microsoft Dynamics Contact Management Solution. At the beginning of the project we were quoted about $12,000 AUD for a specialist company to come in and customize it for us, which we declined in favour of our internal customization and migration.
In the onset it seemed like we could easily justify saving the $12,000 and doing it ourselves, but now given the time put into the project, and the fact that it is still not complete, makes that $12,000 seem like a bargain price. I realize that I am talking about a lot of money here, but given that a .Net programmer could be earning about $90,000 USD in California doing what he is doing here, we are wasting his time.
Since being in YWAM Harpenden I have had some interesting discussions about this as well as the people here have looked at different solutions available for different IT projects. Sometimes an out of the box, proprietary solution that works is a much better choice then a custom piece of software, or sometimes even open source that requires additional training and staff to set-up and support.
Comments
re: Cost Analysis of IT Projects in YWAM
Hi Bill,
you might be right if you would have spend some 1000$ the job would have been done quicker. People at your Base would have been free to do other things and well, who knows, by outsourcing you might have even had an extra chance to share the gospel with someone you most likely will not meet now by doing it yourself.
However, there are always 2 side to a story. You think you are wasting the time of someone who could earn 90000$? What qualifies the waste of time? The fact that this guy could make a lot of money? But what if that is exactly what God wants this person to do in this time, is it then still a waste of time?
I hope you did pray about what to do. I don't want to sound too holy here but I believe that if we do exactly what God wants us to do then it's far from wasting even a single second. If God wants a manager who could earn 1million$ a month to be at a base with 1o people then it's not a waste of time.
So, at the end it always must be in line with what God wants. If we need to outsource something and God gives His OK, then so be it. Otherwise, no time or resource is wasted. At one stage I have had the chance to go into the sound business and I probably could make a lot of money there. For sure more than in my first job as a cabinet maker. I never had the feeling that something like that would've been the right way for me to go. I never thought that doing what I did was a waste of time.
Something I really would like to see is that we have enough IT people in YWAM so that we can "outsource" to other Bases. Then, if I need help with my IT department I could look for help at another Base and if necessary fly someone for over all cost of 3500$ instead of giving jobs to companies outside. This is not for the sake of "we are YWAM, we can do anything ourselves, we don't need the outside world" but for the sake of leaving the funds, that God trust us with, within the church.
However, "church" in that case most likely means YWAM since something your are talking about is a rather time consuming work which pretty much requires full time involvement. So, the local church most likely has no one who could work full time for a month on a project like that. Please, correct me if I'm wrong.
Of course I know that there are christian businesses around and we could outsource to them. But let us be honest it's not as easy to find a business like that. And then still at the end, what does God say what we should do. If we have a DTS student who can work on that, why not. How do we know that God does not want to show him through this work that HE want this guy to serve Him full time as a IT guy in missions....
Just a few thoughts. But as I said, if we need to outsource and God gives His OK, so be it. Otherwise I believe it's not a waste of time at all.
Greetings from the MatriX,
neo
Dilbert's thoughts on it...
Sorry, I couldn't help myself with this one...
(this is not at all meant as a dig at neo, he brings up some very good points above, I just think that Dilbert is funny)
re: Dilbert's thoughts on it...
No worries, mate. It's probably always helpful if you read in between the lines in my comments and prepare yourself for a little ;) and some black humor. So, you are far from making me mad. In fact, I increased the printers workload so I can add to the mess around my desk and bring some more entertainment to the other slackers around me.
Greetings from the MatriX,
neo
I'm a bit late to this conversation...
Dear Bill,
I am a bit late to this conversation but it is an interesting question. I can't easily answer it either. My concern with spending 10,000 on a project would be that this money represents a vast investment in other projects - such as evangelism etc. In fact on my base this would pay for one years advertisements in the city that attracts 200+ clients to our pregnancy crisis centre! Now that is money worth spending.
Whether spending 10,000 on infrastructure is worth it I don't know - you can't compare it as easily as you can in a business; YWAM does not have a "bottom line" of profit. So the cost of hours spent working in projects is not the same!
However, we do have needs for infrastructure just as we have needs for people to work on outreach projects!
When it comes to YWAM and cross-base, cross-border communication, for what it is worth I think that it is not tools we need but a will! We simply don't often value the connection and relation enough to take time to communicate to each other.
Some tools are cheap and/or close to no cost - e.g. the KnowledgeBase project that I am working on (http://www.ywamkb.net). I had the know-how to set it up and the access to enough knowledge to seed it with 100+ articles. Yet: the aim of the project is to connect to and support YWAMers everywhere. This is where the "will" part of it comes in. I will judge the success of the project not by pages added but by users added (and active). At the moment I scratch my head a little for how I am going to do that. I will be at the Festival of the Nations and I will give feedback after that I hope.
One of the best strengths of this site (and mine too I think) is that there is no barrier to access - you can take what you want from it or very simply sign in and contribute. This site is a great tool, free too, but how many people are contributing or even know about it? I found it by googling!
I think the key is to get YWAMers everywhere talking to each other. These tools can help that but we have a long way to go till there is a snowball effect happening. It is an up hill struggle just now. And I'm not sure of the way forward, but I think we are seeing glimpses!
Kevin