Changing the room request system

I’m not sure when the system was created, but one of our reputations involves room requests. Our room request system is notorious for being a time consuming, headache producing system. It can take a week or more at times for someone to request a room for an upcoming event. There were valid reasons behind the system, though it wasn’t customer oriented.

The previous church I worked in used a multi-use approach to their facility. Every room in the building was considered a multi-use room that could be used by any ministry, as they needed. I’d imagine that approach could work well in most church ministries. However, a State-certified daycare and a full school program create challenges to a multi-use approach.

For one, the State requirements for the daycare are explicit when it comes to sanitary/cleanliness standards not only for the room, but also for all of the furniture and equipment in the room. That places a burden on the room users to be familiar with the codes and trained to abide by them.

A full school program comes with many extra-curricular activities on top of the daily educational schedule. There’s always a large block of time each day when the educational rooms, if not the entire educational wing is simply unavailable. The same applies to the daycare area since those rooms house children for 12-hours a day.

Our room request system tried to account for these unique challenges. The ministry leaders over each ministry that used a room had to approve every request. With some of our rooms that meant that upwards of four to five people needed to approve the request! As you can imagine, ministry leaders have a lot to administrate and signing off on a room request was often the least of their concerns and it wasn’t unusual for the requests to sit on desks for a day or two and for all the approvals to be secured in over a week. I once jokingly compared this process to NASA’s challenges in staying in contact with the Mars Orbiter.

Over the past couple of years, building use has increased and our ministries want to do more and more activities. It was clear that the laborious orbit-approval process was going to be too time consuming and take too long in order for us to function efficiently, so we’ve changed the system.

We’ll still be utilizing the same principles, daycare and school rooms have to primarily serve those ministries and the State codes must be enforced for the daycare rooms and the kitchens. What we are eliminating is the orbit procedure. We’ve centralized the approval process into one individual who knows the intricacies of each room but can approve requests on the spot.

This will definitely speed up the approval process and help us be more focused on serving our ministries and those who use the facility.