Inside Nspire - Our Thoughts about Nspire, Church Management Software & Ministry

 There are a lot of gotchas in custom software development. I have spoken to and visited many churches that were not successful developing custom software. Here are some things to consider:

• Sometimes a church may have a member who is a software developer who wants to donate their time to develop a data base. Before you say yes, consider, what will happen to your data base if the member leaves, loses interest, can no longer support the development, or has bitten off more than they can chew.
• Get the contract right. To be successful, your contract must be extremely specific. No generalities. Anything like, “We want all the features ACS has,” should be a huge red flag! Each feature you want needs to be clear. This is so important. You need to have specifics in the contract for breach of contract, payment schedule, deadlines, testing and bug fixes.
• Make sure you set deadlines that are realistic. Developing your custom software is going to take time, maybe years. Break the project into small chunks and get results. If your developer misses the first deadline, I guarantee they will miss the rest too.
• Communicate often. Get interim updates during the process. Do not wait until a week before a deadline to check in with the developer. Stay involved. You want to head off delays early. Realize too, everytime you ask for something different or ever say, “Oh, yeah it needs to do this too,” you have just increased the cost and the development time of the project.
• Make sure you partner with a software developer who is going to be around 5 years from now when you want something changed. Unless you have staff available to develop the software in-house, you will need help from time to time from the original developer.
• Get the source code. Make sure you get the source code in the contract. It is the only way you can modify and update the software yourself.
• Choose a development platform that you can easily hire staff to develop in. Basic is not a good choice neither is PERL for long term code usability. Use something common and widely used. If you do not know, ask the developer what tools they are using, how much they cost, and who else is using them. 

Forgive me for being somewhat passionate about this subject. I have seen so many churches fail at custom software. While custom software has worked for some very large churches with large budgets and staff members dedicated to the project, off the shelf software is a much better fit for most churches. If you decide on custom software, buyer beware. You can be successful, just be careful along the way.

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