Earlier this afternoon I posted this thought to Twitter:

Scary Thing #1 as an engineer: people who just want the magic words rather than wanting to understand the problem.

My buddy Geof suggested on Facebook that I should take it easy on managers, but I let him know that no, I wasn’t talking about a manager, I was talking about a fellow engineer. And so then I got to thinking.

Now, I work in the aviation industry. We have very strict regulations and processes we follow when we write embedded software, and for good reason. Let’s face it, when you’re next flying in an airplane, you’d like to hope that we didn’t screw up the code in your Flight Display or your Autopilot or your GPS. So at the beginning of a development program we write a software development plan, where we explain in nauseating detail exactly how we’re going to go about developing the software. The tools we’re going to use, the processes we follow to review the code and fix any errors, the way we’re going to test it, the whole nine yards.

Now, if you’re a new hire right out of college, I expect that you’re going to be able to take that Development Plan and follow the processes we’ve defined. And I don’t really expect you to understand yet why we’re doing it. But before too many years go by you have to make the step to get past understanding the “what” of the Development Plan and get to understanding the “why” we wrote it that way.

Sure, some training will help. Sit down and read a copy of DO-178B sometime when you get bored. And some mentoring along the way is very valuable. But eventually, if you’re gonna turn into a really good engineer, you’re gonna have to be able to think through it for yourself. Hmmm…. Here’s our regulatory objective. Here’s how we’ve done it in the past. But… we could do something different, it would be more efficient, and it would still achieve the same root purpose, which is what we’re really after.

Because engineers, after all, are a pragmatic people. (We’ll ignore the curmudgeons among us for a minute.) On the whole, their primary objective isn’t simply following the book. They’re more interested in finding an efficient, elegant solution that does it right and, in our industry, does it safe. Beyond that, if you’ve got an idea, say so!

So this is my plea to my fellow engineers out there. (And yes, the fact that I’m writing this at 8:30 on a Friday night is sad proof that I’m an engineer.) Use your heads. Think about it. Start trying to understand the why and don’t just be satisfied with the what. Eventually it’ll start to make sense, and when it does, you’ll be well on your way to becoming a successful senior engineer.

I’ve basically narrowed down our web-based CMS search to two programs: Church Community Builder and PurposeWare. I’ve worked with the online demo of CCB for a few days now and liked what I’ve seen. It is very feature-rich and detailed. My fear is that it might be too detailed and might scare away potential users. I haven’t seen PurposeWare up close yet; they will schedule a live demo for me with a sales person, but I can’t just go do it myself. No time to do it this week; I think I’ll set aside some time next week to get the demo.

Both companies have reduced pricing in place for church plants; PurposeWare says they’ll give it to us for free for a year, but haven’t told me yet how much it’ll cost after that. I have a price on CCB that I think we could handle if it’s the best choice. I’m shooting for next week sometime to get a decision made and get signed up.

I’m convinced that picking a good Church Management Software (CMS from here on out) will be an important thing for Imago Christi. So for the past couple of days I’ve spent some time Googling various CMS options. There is no shortage of options; the Google search has multiple pages of primary sites that offer some sort of software, and those software packages seem to run the whole gamut. There are the amazingly cheap and out-of-date packages that are still being offered; there are more expensive packages available. One particular frustration is that a bunch of sites won’t even give you pricing information up front; they want your contact info so they can have someone call you. I hate talking to salesmen, and there’s no sense in them pitching a $1000 software package to me, no matter how good it is – we can’t afford it.

Being a geek and very internet-savvy, it boggles my mind how many really really poor websites there are for these programs. Seriously, the sites look like they were created in 1995 by a high-schooler who needed a weekend project. And like they haven’t been updated since then. I have to wonder how many copies of the software they’re selling if they can’t even afford a decent website.

There are a couple options I have found that have web-based solutions that are very attractive: PurposeWare and Church Community Builder. Both appear to be much more robust than the typical CMS, allowing church members to access the tool online to update information, sign up for mailing lists, etc. Of course, both of these places want me to leave my contact info so they can get back to me… but I think with these two it’ll be worth it. At least these two have websites that I wouldn’t be embarrassed to have associated with my organization.

I’ll do some more evaluation in the next week and try to come up with a recommendation. Then we just need to justify it in the budget…