pulse on the ground

I just had a pretty cool experience. I gave a short demo on the pulse at the new discipleship group (roughly, Bible studies that do ministry together -- we call them DG's for short) training at McMaster. There were maybe 50 students and 3 staff there.

What was neat is seeing how the pulse is being used "on the ground". I fielded a number of questions that gave me some insight in to what's confusing people and how they're using the pulse.

I overheard one student saying how he was able to go to the directory, where it lists all people in your campus, and start straight up calling and contacting people who weren't in a DG group already. Since we've imported all conference registration accounts, there's a few thousand people in the pulse already. That proactive student was able to start connecting people, just because the information was there to do so.

One of the staff was also telling me how it's provided some accountability for leaders. Before, they would say "hey, make sure to pick a time for your DG!" and hope that it would happen. Now, their time is right there on the web site. If they haven't chosen a time, it says "TBA", and if they have, it's updated as soon as they enter it. Now staff can make sure times are chosen by a certain date.

Then some of the staff gave me some feedback and feature ideas, and I showed them how to do various things that they weren't clear on or just didn't know you could do. Overall the demo was good but just being there was the really valuable part. It was really neat to see the pulse in action.

Ops Huddle

Last week I traveled to London, Ontario to join the rest of the operations team. We had people fly in from BC and out west and from the Maritimes. There were about 8 of us. Starting Tuesday and going till Thursday, we heard from international and national presenters remotely, and discussed what we as an operations team will be doing in the next year. As my boss blogged about, we weren't retreating -- instead we called it the "Ops Huddle".

We decided that our goal for this year is to position the pulse to be our premium app. That will entail making sure we really support our staff as they use the pulse, being quick on bug fixes and having a high standard for new feature releases. On a technical end, this also means making the pulse the center of our infrastructure, using libraries and web services to communicate with our other apps.

Overall I really appreciated the focus and clarity that emerged from our time there. It was great to meet some of the team in person and hang out, especially for those in other parts of the country (and we definitely have distributed team). We even found time for some starcraft gaming!

The Pulse is Online!

I'm excited to announce that we have released the movement tracker for the Canadian staff! We're calling it "the pulse", alluding that this tool will help gauge the ministry's status, and will become a critical piece of infrastructure.

Already we have well over 50 groups created, across 14 campuses! To each of you supporting me in some way, know that you were a part of making this happen. It's really exciting to see this come together.


I'm thankful for the additional of Josh and Deb, staff based out of the Maritimes, who are joining our ops team. Josh has already provided personalized support, which has really enhanced our user experience. Deb has provided graphics and an artistic eye for the colours and branding of the pulse (and will do so for other web sites).

As mentioned in the last post, we trimmed down the movement tracker substantially from the international version (being developed jointly with the United States, Canada and Australia). We removed all features we weren't sure were up to par, were unclear on how to use in our ministry, or that we simply didn't want. As a result, we have a highly supported and documented piece of software that does much less -- namely, compare timetable, update personal information, and manage groups -- but it does it well. In the coming months we plan to add more features.