Podcast Episode 111: Episode 83: Walking Through The Rock Roadmap

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On this episode of Rock Cast Jon and Emily are joined by the Commish, Nick Airdo, to discuss everything that is upcoming.

Transcribed Content

This episode of Rockcast is brought to you by Rock partner Triumph Tech, a full service specialist partner. Rock partners provide crucial support for Spark Development Network and important services for the Rock community. Connect with Triumph Tech today at rockrms.com/partners. Welcome to another edition of Rockcast, the podcast where we take you behind the scenes so you can learn what's going on with Rock RMS and with the team building it at Spark Development Network. I am Emily Forman, And today we have Jon Edmiston and Nick Airdo here, and we will get you all caught up. So this is what podcast number two of behind the scenes this year, I think. Yeah. So years off to a good start. It's off to a great start. And as usual, we have a lot of things going on. It's kind of hard to know sometimes. I bet people don't realize the time that we spend trying to figure out what are the things we should elevate to put in the podcast, how do we know, what's the most important thing to talk about. There's always quite a bit happening, so that's a challenge. It is. Yeah. I'd to say that we strategically plan these and have the whole catalog for the whole year kind of planned out, but it's not quite that. Have thoughts of what we want to put in them for a while, but sometimes it's a rush to gather all this information because this we have a day job too. That's true. Although, it would be kind of funny, I think, to plan the whole year's worth of podcast content. And then at the end of the year, look at where we actually were Yeah. Based on what we thought. Things just changed so fast around here. Right. Yeah. Someone was asking the other day about, well, I wish I wish the road map that that thing was on the road map that you talked about just now. And I was , well, that just came into existence literally last week, and it wasn't from us. It was from a client who wanted this feature, and I was , oh, that's a great idea. And they're , okay. Well, can we work with you to to fund that? And it's , sure. Yeah. Let's do that. Hadn't even been, , gone to statement of work or even been fleshed out, but I mentioned it to another person the next week. Oh, yeah. We're gonna be adding this. And they're , why is it not on the roadmap? Well, it literally, , was spoken to existence. , we can count it in hours. Right. Yeah. So sorry. It's still some sort of cloud formation. The rain hasn't hit the ground on that one yet. Right. But that is the nature of what we do. I think what know, what's good about that I mean, it sounds bad. Right? But it's actually a good thing because we're we're super responsive to what's needed. Mhmm. Even as people submit ideas, I get the instant it gets submitted, I get a copy. Some of those ideas are going straight into the development pipeline. Sometimes we don't even reference that because it's really hard for us to sometimes by speaking words, they become commitments, and we don't know when we get in there. It's , Oh, well, that sounded really easy, but it's actually going to be a lot more work. Well, that doesn't mean that the idea will never happen, but it pushes it back. If it's something that comes in and we think, Well, that might only take three or four hours, let's just knock that out. Right? Well, it gets to the developer. They go, oh, yeah. But x, y, and z. And you're , oh, okay. Yeah. That's that's gonna take a few days to a few weeks. And it's still a good idea, but it loses its urgency or priority because impactful and simple is a no brainer. Mhmm. Impactful and takes a ton of time has a different way of it it gets scheduled. So but that fluid type nature of Rock sometimes is its power, but sometimes it also has other ramifications that communication's a little bit harder. That's true. And it's kind of hard to explain, but I think really do think that's the thing that community gets excited about is that it is so responsive and the fluctuation is there. So when something needs to change and the community gets behind it, there's the ability to really have an impact in the product, which is pretty incredible and and not typical. Yeah. I think just, , make sure that you give us a little grief sometimes when we don't say stuff, it's because if we say anything, it it feels we've just committed to a long term thing, and things are so much more complex behind the scenes. In fact, Nick and I were just talking yesterday before we're walking out to the cars, how complex some of this stuff is. We just looked at each other If people knew how complex this was, just one little simple thing. I mean, I don't even know what we're talking about, but Yeah. It could have been in any number of areas that I'm we're currently dealing with. It's just kind of the nature of software as it grows. It it's gotten so functional, and there's so many avenues inside of Rock and layers that it it's just complicated. Yeah. And I think it had something to do with, , well, we the change is easy, but making sure that we migrate it correctly across everybody's machine is the hard thing, which again is reminds me of the time when we used to write software just for one organization. It was so much easier to deploy into production knowing you only had one environment to worry about and to to migrate. Yeah. But so so less satisfying than being able to impact, , 550 now churches. Right. But as we grow, the balance of extensibility and simplicity is just really, really an incredibly hard fine line to walk. Yeah. I think a big piece or certainly a significant piece of our job is is basically describing where the landmines are. As we step on a landmine, say, oh, okay, well, Watch out for that one. Not your fault for stepping on the landmine, but it's your fault if you step on it again, the same And so we're constantly writing up our lessons learned and our procedures so that we don't step on the same one twice. And luckily, most of the landmines we step on are our own landmines, running it on our production system. , we've certainly tripped up ourselves a little bit in the last two weeks on some very recent code. And the good thing is it's all been worked out on our system. Yeah. No one no one else will see it. That's probably gotta be one of the best decisions we made from early on is to use Rock Yeah. Before everyone else. Little embarrassing, though, when you have a a master class going on and people are checking in because we wanna use our check-in for it. Right? Right. It's not printing labels. It's , yeah. Surely, if someone around here knows how to get the printer to work. Right? Well, it turns out it was just code that we had just released, , days before. And so we updated our process too for for master class, make sure that we not only test it, but we test the printing, which again, hindsight sounds simple, but it's now on the checklist for master class But also we found that bug and squashed it. Well, every step on a checklist is probably there because somebody ran into something at some time. Oh, right. And I don't think people realize how process driven we are here and how much what we do because so many things change, we realize that our standards have to be well documented and we have to be able to move through the things that we know quickly and without committing a lot of decision making power to the steps that we know how to do well. So as an organization, we document it, we get it down, and then we use the the mental power for the the new things. Right. And and process and structure that is optional anymore. Not not just for us, but for anybody. Our our world is a is a world of complexity and high structure. And, , anybody who's not using the simple tools a checklist in their day to day jobs is is really doing so at their detriment. That's true. It's it's to basically relive stepping on the same landmine over and over if you don't. Sounds a painful repeated experience. You try and avoid those when possible. Yeah. I always try to say, , love your future self. That's a good one. Alright. So let's get to Rock the product, where we are, what our latest version is, what's rolling out, what's the update on that? Let me address that. So we've been on ten one for a little while now, and 10.2, by the time everyone hears this will be an alpha, possibly beta, but for sure alpha. And it's got a number of fixes and features this go around. Normally, don't try to put features in to these point releases, but we were putting in a lot of underlying piping for some of the future features, we realized it was gonna be even more complicated if we just didn't pull the trigger fully. So with that, things advanced group placement will be now for sure in 10 dot two, which is also called group or camp tools by some people. Mhmm. And we made a change to the system email components in Rock, and they are now system communications. Now system emails will still be there, and we copy all the existing ones over from system email to system communication, and that we do that to ease plug in developers and every everything else that's pointing at the old stuff. Now we, in Rock, with this upgrade, move and point everything over to system communication, but we don't control plugins. And why why are we doing that? What's the nature of the change? Good question. So we were adding some features into system email. I'm gonna call it system communication now. And the feature is SMS capabilities. So although you'll now see some SMS fields inside of a system communication, it doesn't mean it's being used everywhere. There's a select few places where we started to implement that. I think RSVP reminders and send group attendance or send attendance reminders will now be SMS enabled. So if you're a group leader and you can go into the group toolbox, flip a switch to say, I wanna receive SMS. And then your reminders will will be sent to you that way. Yeah. Feel , Garrett, especially from the data model perspective, Rock is was really well thought out trying to be future proof. I think this is one example where we kinda maybe missed it just a little bit, thinking that system emails were always gonna be emails, and now people are , yeah, I want an email or a text depending on what the preference of the user or the attendee is, and it's , yeah, that makes total sense. We can't do that right now. It's a good change. It also, I think to me personally, it it draws clarification between what is a system communication versus a communication template. Mhmm. And I'm gonna just cover that briefly. A system a communication is a communication that's intended to be sent and created by the system, not a user. Communication templates are those things that your users, your staff will interact with, and you can shape and and customize those for them. But they're the ones that are really engaging and putting the content in there. System communications are the contents coming from the system. Mhmm. And that that causes a lot of questions. I I get that asked that question a lot, and I even asked it myself a lot. , what wait. Why did we do that? And I had to keep reminding myself, they seem , why didn't you just use the same thing? And and at the very bottom, you can't. , it's just a little bit different. Yeah. Different enough to need a new one. So we will have a good round of alpha and beta testing, probably a little longer beta testing because of the number of changes and features. Yeah. And and most systems, I think they would really call this a full major release. There's that many new features. It's pretty exciting. I pushed for that. I wanted to call this v 11, but we couldn't because we had already said what v 11 was gonna be. Right. It goes back to the commitments that we said, Right. If only words held little weight. Alright. Let's have an event update for Rock Events and look at what we have going on for the community right now. So we've kind of kicked off our roadshow season. We have some roadshows on the calendar. We're in communication with a lot of our Rock stars right now about hosting a roadshow in their area. So if this is something you feel you would to be a part of, we definitely have need of more roadshows. Reach out to us and let us know. The commitment on that is that we provide you with a presentation. You provide the location, we do the registration for you, put out some typical invites to those who are in our database and to our social media groups and into Rocket Chat. And then you personalize those because the attendance is really driven by your personal invites to the people in your area. And then you have a q and a period at the end of it. So it's about a two hour commitment. And what a great excuse to network with your local churches. Yes. I mean, it's such a cool idea. Mhmm. We've had so many great conversations come out of roadshows. And quite honestly, a lot of people at this point have heard of Rock, but they don't really understand why and how it's different or how that might benefit them. So you in the community really hold the the answers to that even more than we do. And for a church to be able to come and hear from you, what Rock is to work in and and why that's been beneficial to your team, that's that's exactly what they need to hear. And that's a a pretty, easy way to impact other churches inside the Rock community. It's a great way to begin demonstrating leadership. And guess what? You don't have to know all the answers. So that's great. The content's provided for the presentation. When it comes to the q and a, I would say just remember we have a lot of great resources out there that you can point people to. And feel free after a roadshow to reach back out to us and say, hey, we had a couple of unanswered questions or someone that needs a connection, and we can also help with that as well. So as far as the commitment goes on this, it's kind of a fun one. And we provide you with a lot of great tools to make it something where you shouldn't have to feel nervous about not knowing all the answers. And I will just say, nobody knows all the answers. What we're working with as a product and a community now is so large that all the answers aren't sitting in some residual brain or memory bank somewhere. It is something that we all work together and use the resourcing and the tools there to remember, to find, and to reference. All right. So in addition to roadshows, what else do we have going on? We just wrapped up a masterclass that went really well. We are fully engaged in all the new content now, things steps are being taught. The assessments are in there as well. We have four days of content. It's a really incredible training tool. If you took it a long time ago, it's four days now instead of three, and we have quite a bit more information. It might be a nice refresher for you. We have a masterclass coming up in April. That's already I think we're at about 10 people in that class already now. So if you're interested in that one, I would probably register pretty soon. And then we have one right before the conference as well. So that does help some people with their travel. So again, that one is already we're seeing registrations there too. So in both of those, we do have some limits. You'll want to make sure you not only plan for it, but that you let us know you're planning for it by getting your registration and reserving your spot. Additionally, we mentioned the conference that is still coming. We're very excited about this. We have most of our speakers lined up now. We have a lot of our content coming in. This conference, we keep saying it, it's going be bigger, it's going to be better, it's going to be totally different this time around. And community is going to be the focus. We're so excited about it. If you are in the Rock community, you absolutely cannot afford to miss this event. Yeah. I think a lot times we talk about the conference being different because of the location, and that is gonna be amazing. But that's not just the only change. Changing locations so we can continue to expand and add things, and so we are adding things. the partner expo area is going to be just huge, and you're actually going to have a lot more stuff to look at and touch and play with. And so we're working with a lot of vendors to bring stuff so you can actually see it being worked on. We'll talk about who they are a little bit later when we I think we have some pretty good commitments, but we want to make sure that those are all locked in before we promise. , words have weight, so That's very true. But it's going to be really good. In fact, we have a meeting commit tomorrow to talk about more about some of those partners and vendors. Some of those vendors have never been to the conference, so exciting. It's very exciting. And then, of course, the as you mentioned, the location means that we get to do community together kind of around the clock for this conference event. So we're excited about that. We've been reminding people book your hotel room when you book your ticket because there are limited rooms available to stay in at that center and you want to be there. It's going to really make or break your event. And I think we're about halfway full on our rooms right now. So if you've booked a conference ticket and you haven't gotten your room yet, I would suggest that you do that soon. Yep. So those are kind of the events. That's our update on that. We've also been talking about we have learned so much in the last year. I mean, we've learned a lot over time, but it seems in the last year, we've learned so much about the best ways to work. And we keep talking about documenting our best practices. And lately, John, you've been mentioning how we work and there's this whole concept and we've been building this and not really realizing it. And now we're saying, oh, how we work has so many best practices inside of it. How do we get this out and start sharing it with the community? Because these things can benefit everybody. Right. And I think one of the interesting things is as we grow on the consulting side, we bring in new people. And it's one of the things that we pour a lot of time and effort in is to train them how we work and why we do certain things the way we do, which has forced us to really, , contemplate that. I mean, I think sometimes we just do things and we don't know why we do things or why why we feel that's the best reason. Now we have to articulate that and put it into words, and I think it's really helped us cement in some of these concepts, which is great because it empowers them, allows them to do stuff that typically maybe we could only do, but then they learn things and have experiences, and then they're able to share those back, not only with us, but with all of their other teammates, which, again, if you write it down, they're stepping on landmines too and going, hey, there's one right there too. We shouldn't step on that. And so we're building this organizational knowledge base, and so we want to, as much as we can, share all that. Now, we'd share every bit of it if that was possible, but it just takes a lot of effort to even do that. So we thought we'd talk about some of the things that we've learned and maybe take one per podcast as we can. We definitely want to get these into a different format. My original thought was probably not to share it on a podcast, but to have other videos, but they just take so much time, and we're going to do that. We actually have one made already, but it's not quite ready to publish. But we thought we would just kind of get started by talking briefly on the podcast about it and just know more is to come. So we're going to talk about over the next few podcasts, how to gather requirements. We'll talk about that one today. How we do estimating, which is pretty interesting, and looking at tools that have been used in a secular world that we can bring in, maybe when and why to make customizations into your environment and how to do that in a safe way, Lots of different topics. Another topic I'm really kind of interested into is fringe features. Features that are in Rock that, yeah, they're there, but don't get addicted to them because they're there to be used on the fringes, but if you use it all the time day to day, you might trip yourself up. And a lot of this is really about respecting your future self. We say that so much, but it's so true. But today, let's talk a little bit about how to gather requirements. And this is something I've I've I've been able to work on my whole career. , it seems my whole career in the secular world, and then a lot definitely at at CCV was about gathering requirements. I've always been a pretty technical person, but I've always also had a role where I had to talk to business leaders and be a bridge between the technology and the business leader. And sometimes when I worked at Honeywell, I often thought, , why do I keep working on all these weird different things? And now I know, , God had a plan. I just didn't understand it back then. So here are some of the tips that we would tell people as you talk with your ministry leaders. How do you talk with them to understand what they're saying and to get the best solution possible? And I think the first thing to start with is ego. It's so important that you go into these conversations with the right ego. If you have a high ego, you're not gonna listen, and it's possible you're gonna miss the requirements, or you might miss the solution that they're proposing might be a good solution, and you might write it off because of ego. That said, if your ego's too low, your confidence may not be there, and you might start listening to their solution, and it may not be a great solution at all. The requirements are good. You can't argue that. Right? The business user ministry leader, they know the requirements better than most, but that doesn't mean that they understand the solution or how to get to the end result. So you really have to have this this fine balance of ego, and you need to go into every conversation just checking it because if you don't, you oftentimes will will not be listening. So the most important thing is after ego is listening, making sure that you understand the needs of the client, and making sure that what you're going to propose is going to fill those needs. That said, and this is an important key one, don't be hypnotized by the client. So I think, Emily, you added to our codex, the document where we described this, the Jungle Book snake from yesteryear that had the eyes, that, , rotated around. Because that's that's what I always thought of when I'm talking to a client. I'm , don't get hypnotized by the snake. They're not trying to hypnotize you. They're not trying anything nefarious. It's just that you start listening to them, and they're and and it's hard for a ministry leader. They're they're probably going to try to solve the solution themselves. They're going to say their problem themselves. They're going say, Here's the problem, but they're really describing the solution. And so, you need to listen, because those are the requirements. But don't start going down the path of, Oh, yes, this will be a workflow, and then we'll do because you're getting hypnotized. So listen as intently as possible. Don't try to talk over them. Just listen. One of the techniques that we use is the five whys. So you ask why five times, and it's not necessarily a hard fast five times, but you really want to find out why do they want that. There's a a video, you can watch it on YouTube, that we we talk about. It's about the Jefferson Monument, and they're finding that the exterior of it was wearing away way too fast. And they thought, well, why is that happening? Oh, well, it turns out it's because the the maintenance facility guys are just power washing it every day. Okay. Well, why are they doing that? Well, there happens to be, , a lot of bat droppings that are there. Oh, well, you could leave it at that, but why are there bats? Well, because there's a lot of spiders in the building, and the bats the spiders and all that stuff. Oh, well, why are there spiders? Well, there's a lot of bugs, and the spiders there are drawing the bugs. Okay. Why are there a lot of bugs? Well, the bugs are there because the lights are on all night, and the bugs love the lights. And so the spider it creates the spiders. So they decided, well, let's not turn the lights on all night. Let's turn them off at a certain point, appropriate spot. And they found by turning off the lights, everything went away. And so you really have to keep asking why until you get down to the root piece of the problem. So sometimes that's gonna be five, sometimes it's be six, seven, sometimes it's one or two. When you start asking why for a when you go past the root and you ask why, it , because it's a dumb question. But you really have to understand the why. And someone was talking another video I was watching, the the guy who is who does this for a living too was talking about, it's very important that understanding comes before speed in this in this conversation. There's sometimes a tension to go fast, but but understanding has to come before speed. And you might even tell the person that, hey. I just wanna let ahead of time that this is I'm gonna have to ask a lot of questions. It's gonna feel a lot of questions, but this is the only way I know to get the right details. If you say it ahead of time, there's less frustration in that. When you announce the pain that you're gonna go through, it it doesn't feel as painful, but making sure that you ask why. So once you get all the why now here's what I do. I take the solution, because usually the problem comes in the form of their solution. I take their solution, and I dismiss it in my head only. Right? You don't say that. Right. Henry Ford had a great quote that I love that said, If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse. Now sometimes ego check here, they are right. That's exactly right. But put it aside and say and and play the contrarian, , in your head. So if I was gonna do this a different way, how else could I solve this? Dismissing this idea. I'm not gonna use this idea. What's another idea? Okay? Now, what's another one in my head? So in my head, after I've listened, I'm trying to dismiss the solution provided and try to find if there's another one. It's just a thinking game to make sure that you get the right one. So then you can present that back to them. Now, what happened at CCV, I would have these conversations with a lot of the ministry leaders, and one in particular, we were always talking, and she would comment , I love coming in here because I come in with my problem and my solution, and I leave with a different solution, but it's always a better one. So that's where you have to really kinda listen. The worst thing you can do is not listen to their solution, , too, because then they don't feel heard. They don't mind leaving with another solution as long as they felt that they were heard. So that's, , one of the things that we do is play these, , thought games. Even when I go back to my desk sometimes when we're looking at features, I'll I'll create a solution, and I'll just kinda dismiss it and throw it away and go, what if I couldn't do that? What if that feature didn't exist? How else could I do this? And oftentimes, the second or third, , brainstorm actually come up with something something better. So those are some of the the tips that we give, , our team when we talk about requirements. And I but I really think the key is, , don't follow the client down the rabbit hole too far with the solution. Always come back up and get another breath of air and check to make sure that that's really the right solution. And that's a great point. Those are all things that are that make sense theoretically, but we don't necessarily compile them, think about them and apply them when we're having those conversations. And whether your client is internal or external, I think that's equally important. Sometimes I think with internal clients, we can assume we already know what the problem is, because we're familiar with the team or the person and that may not be the case. Yeah, and I still catch myself being caught off guard by them. Wait, how did we get here? Oh, I wasn't critically thinking. I just was going along with the proposed solution and never considering. Because we do that oftentimes. , we'll just drop into someone's office and say, hey, Annie, I need help with this, this, and this. And it's , okay, well, why are we doing it that way? Oh, oh, well, we should back up. There's an actually an easier way. And that happens with all of us. , sometimes we just need to bounce it off other people. Absolutely. Context is really very important in all of this. Well, thanks for sharing that, John. I know that you've been working on the best way to share that and on what those tips are for a long time, and that's been really beneficial internally to our team. Yeah. I wish it could have been something a little bit easier to share out, but we'll get started with this. Mhmm. And we do have an intention of of making this more official. And there's lots more topics that we wanna talk about. There are a lot of topics. I'm glad you brought that up. So we'll try to embed additional how we work topics into most of our regular podcasts for a while here going forward. Yeah. All right. Well, thank you everybody for tuning in with us today. We look forward to connecting with you next time. Have a great day. Do a church that loves the idea of using Rock but hasn't taken that leap yet? With managed hosting, churches of any size can get access to Rock's amazing technology, hassle free. With just one click, Rock's managed hosting removes the roadblocks that might stop a church from switching to Rock by making the process simple. Churches get the ease of a SaaS church management system without losing any of Rock's powerful features. Are you ready to take the next step or share with another local church? Visit rockrms.com/hosting today.