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I’m going through the Agile Practice Guide, and I’m about to start chapter 4 on setting up an agile environment.   Before I start on that chapter, however, I wanted to state an unusual motivation for learning about agile.

Besides being important for my professional development as a project manager, I am interested in seeing if there are agile methods that might help get our church on solid ground in terms of growth and outreach to the community.   I am the President of the Board of Trustees for my church in here in the Midwest, and about a year ago, we had a major flooding incident which created a lot of damage to the church.   We were insured, fortunately, but the process of repair and restoration took about 9 months to complete.

We JUST moved back in to our building in January, and now everybody is excited to be back and everybody wants to do a lot of different projects to get the church programs going again as they were before, and even increase our membership and outreach to the community.

So I’m reading on agile methodology to see if some techniques, such as using a Kanban board, might help us prioritize the various projects and so create a “project backlog” which we will then work on various committees, until the urgent projects are done.   Once we are “up and running” in the same way as before the flood on an operational level, then we can take up projects that try to grow our congregation and increase our links to the local community.

So using agile for our church is not really so radical an idea after all–we are a non-profit organization after all, and non-profits sometimes need project management even more than for-profit organizations simply because their resources are more limited.   I am interested in Kanban first of all, but we’ll see what other methods might be useful.

Agile is, after all, useful in a time of great change, and that is what is upon us with our move back to our building, so I hope it will be of use to us in the next few months or so!

Tomorrow I will start posting on the contents of Chapter 4 on creating an agile environment…

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