Lessons learned from a football addict

This is high school football season and I am addicted to watching #70 play, my son, on the Trojan offensive line for Valley Christian. The team is 6-1 and playing well. I am consumed this year on learning all the stats about 2A football. I am also re-learning the basics like "it takes a team to win". It's odd how injuries, penalties and luck play into a championship team.

How is your IT Team? Are you all working from the same playbook? Are odd things keeping you team from being a championship IT team for your church?

Learning from our IT projects

We have just finished writing our children's checkin module for Arena CHMS. This was a big project and took a lot of work by our entire IT team. I think it's is easy for us to just move on to the next project. But I think there are lots of important things to learn after a projects completed. I think teams should discuss "lessons learned" from projects in order to grow as a group. For example, we learned that our new ONTIME Agile software programming tool was invalueable to our team. It is now a "best practice" for our team to stop and write down what we have learned from our completed projects.

Fiber optic Testing

Now that our PTP 200mb circuit is installed, its time to test our new bandwidth. We started by simply coping files from our Mesa Campus to our Gilbert Campus which is 10 miles away. These transfers were better than our old T1 circuit but left some questions. I discovered that file tranfers don't maximize the bandwidth.
I have discovered several companies, like Asperasoft.com, that specialize in high-speed file transfer software. We are currently testing their software. Thier software uses UDP to communciate between both sites.
The software reveiled 45% packet lose with our connection. So, is the problem with QWEST or on our network? We now have something else to troubleshoot. We have installed I-PERF to test our connection. The I-PERF teats reveal we are only getting 40 mbits from our fiber ciruit. Now I need to document everything and speak with Qwest.

Optical fiber circuit complete

Qwest just finished installing a 200 MB circuit from our Mesa Campus to our Gilbert Campus. The Gilbert staff is very happy. This circuit replaces our intial T1 circuit. We will now start testing the circuit by copying SD and HD video files (40-50 GB's) each week between campuses. The big question is how long before I get a request to increase this new circuit?

Ever thought about strategic value?

Do all of your IT projects have strategic value? If so, how much? Do we waste time? I think sometimes we work on too many projects that may not have much strategic value. I think we need to develop our thinking, at times, for the long-term. I think this is very hard for us but very important for the church. We need to make sure everything we do directly aligns with the churchs strategic goals. It's easier for us to fix problems and move on.

I challenge you to make a list of all your current projects and rank them by strategic value, its an eye opener.

Qwest Metro Optical Ethernet coming soon

We have signed up for a 200 MB circuit between our Gilbert and Mesa sites. The build out will take Qwest about four months. We are very excited to move beyond our current T1 circuit.

http://www.qwest.com/largebusiness/enterprisesolutions/products/ethernet/moe.html

Postini - ROI on SPAM protection

We converted from Symantec(Brightmail) SPAM filtering about three months ago with expectations to improve our 70% filtering ratio. I'm am extremly pleased with thier filtering service. We are now filtering over 92% of all our email as SPAM. Unbelieveable! Here is something to think about for calculating ROI. We had a total of 354,078 spam emails deleted over the last 30 days. If a staff person would take about five seconds to view and delete each of the SPAM emails, then we have saved about 492 staff hours or $9,835 in staff productivity. (Using an arbituary $20 per hour per staff) Now that's ROI.