We were supposed to switch to a new web-based course registration database as of January 1. The system was to be installed by December 1, so we’d have time to test it out.
I said to my boss, “At some point we’ll have to make a call whether to go to the new program or delay it and stick with the old.” My boss, “I’m comfortable with you making that call, Jim.”
December 1st comes… no program appears. I tell my boss we should stop right then. There won’t be enough time left to test it thoroughly. She hems and haws and we compromise. If it’s nor up in 2 weeks, we’ll hold off til next quarter.
December 15 comes, no program. I say essentially the same thing. My boss calls the marketing woman who’s the liason with the outside programmers. Her confidence is high. It’s almost done on the programmer’s server, there’s just some reports to finish. It’s being tested as it’s written at the other end. It will be ready by January 1. We can reach it at the programmer’s server and load in our course info even before it’s moved to our server…
So we do that, and load data in. Being that I’m not an idiot, I have our people ALSO load the info to the old system as a backup. More work, but it was a slack time.
December 30, and we hear that our IN-HOUSE programmer, will be gone for the next two weeks, so we can’t migrate it into out server and behind our firewall, so we can’t use it because there’ll be credit card info passing through it. New estimated date of “Ready to Use”, January 25, TODAY! Again I say to my boss, let’s use the old system until April. Our classes are quarterly, it’s a really bad idea to make this switch mid-quarter.
“No, we’ve publicized it. We have to get it going. People will be pissed at us.”
So last Saturday I spent a 12 hour day working with the programmers to transfer the data from the old system to the new, which is still on an outside server. Once I leave, all they have to do, they tell me, is copy it into our server.
This morning, I come in at 6:30, and NOTHING that I try works. Not a single report works, so I can’t even sample the data in the two systems to make sure it moved correctly. I make a dummy course registration, which SEEMS to work, but I can’t print a class roster or a financial report to see how it accounts for the money. Nor can I delete the dummy registration.
When the phone open at 8:00 and our phone people come in, I make a call in my boss’s absense. Don’t use the new system, we can’t tell what it’s doing.
My boss comes in a 9:00. I talk to her. She talks to the marketing woman, who talks to the programmer, etc. Ultimately, the word comes back. Keep using the new system, the reports will work by the end of the day.
Some of them do by midafternoon. We learn that anyine who signed up for 2 seats (for them and a spouse or child) in a class has been given 4 seats in the new system. We learn that the system designed to allow us to give discounts doesn’t work. We learn that it ignores the maximum class size number, so we can overfill a class without even a warning from the system.
But we can still register people and we are still using it. By the time I left, after an 11 hour day today, we’re assured it will all be fixed by morning.
Sure.
Fuck! My boss has repeatedly told me she trusts my judgement. I tried to make the call, and I made the RIGHT call, but it wasn’t allowed to stand.
Fuck!