I expect there is more to what John calls the “Post Method”, but the challenges covered in this short MP3 recording of their talk include:

• Who is your audience?
• Who will champion this plan and strategy?
• Who will execute this plan and strategy?
• Who will not be participating?

A challenge I immediately saw upon beginning work at this church was that they were understaffed in the desktop and network support areas. They had two (count them) people supporting 90+ computers and 45+ checkin machines. We quickly hired a third person, but our helpdesk resolution average continued to push five business days. One of the things that exacerbates the lengthy resolution time is that 50+ user computers are over 4 years old. We immediately set out to get budget to replace between 33-45% of user computers in 2008 with Macs (more on that in a later post).

So as we have begun to take some computers out of circulation, we are getting more and more people interested in computers that for all intents and purposes should be burned in malicious ways. But, they know IS has them and come asking for computers to do this or that or the other. It is just plain hard to get rid of these computers since there is still a bit of life left in them.

My old office-mate Barry Buchanan was giving me a hard time in a comment on my last post, and so I thought I would cross-post one of his fine cartoons that illustrates what my team has been going through lately. You can laugh more at Barry by subscribing to his feed.