Have you been living under a ROCK????

[manuka.livejournal.com]

For the last 9 months or so, we've been gestating our new church management system, and finally gave birth to a healthy application this past Tuesday. Because the new application still requires some components to be developed, portions of the legacy application will still be used for a while (such as our accounting)

This has been widely publicized to the staff, hyped, trained, and generally beaten to death. On tuesday at noon (as announced), we administered general anesthesia to the legacy app and performed a lobotomy that locked out everyone from the portions of the application that were no longer to be used (which was darn near everything). at 2:30, we brought it out of its IT-induced coma and told everyone that the new app was up and running, and had a launch party with ice cream sundaes. A good time was had by all, and everyone was excited about the new app, because the old app simply sucked that badly.

The cutover has been generally smooth, the support hotline rang only once today (yay!), and most folks are easing into the new way of doing things quite nicely (although our ticket load for other stuff is climbing rather rapidly)

And then, just as the day is ending, we get a new ticket alert:

11997 - Need information to access $legacy_app.
Description:
I am not able to access $legacy_app. I don't know if I have forgotten my login name and password or what? I think it use to automatically connect..? Could you please let me know what my information is to access it? Thanks.

My boss about hit the roof. He's going to escalate that one to her director. I suggested we merely close the ticket with "application functioning as designed, contacted facilities about removal of the rock you've been hiding under for the last 9 months."

Comments

[lightforce.livejournal.com]

Wow! That's taking "willful ignorance" to a whole new level.

I can sympathize. When I worked in the computer labs at the university I attend, we had problems like this quite frequently. Never anything quite so infuriating, though.

[mattcaron.livejournal.com]

church management system

I am unfamiliar with this concept. What part of a church needs to be managed aside from event planning and financials both of which have a pile of applications which serve this need? I'm not busing balls, I'm genuinely intrigued.

[manuka.livejournal.com]

Members.

[mattcaron.livejournal.com]

I don't suppose you care to expand on that any more?

[manuka.livejournal.com]

Well, a church has members. You have to keep track of their contact info, family relationships, and a host of other things like contributions, pledging, missions involvement, attendance (a major metric of church activity) and so on.

In many ways it's a lot like a CRM application, only very specialized (in fact, there are a few products out there in the ChMS market that are built on Dynamics)

It's a fairly narrow market (a large majority of the churches out there can be (and are) managed on an excel spreadsheet or an access database. In our case, we need to keep track of somewhere north of 60,000 people, 1/4 of which are our members, so the software is considerably more complex (annual support/maintenance is on the order of about $18000 for this product, above and beyond our own regular costs for supporting users and such)

Church IT is a very small world, in that there are only a few hundred churches big enough to require full-time IT staff, and the number that require more than one full-time IT person is even smaller than that. Our department is 9 people (about 5.5 FTE) and we don't deal with any aspects of audiovisual/live production.

[manuka.livejournal.com]

Oh, and our facility planning software is actually outsourced to an external vendor (ServiceU, which specializes in church facility resource management) - our ChMS doesn't do that.

Our worship planning platform is also separate, and is SaaS from planningcenteronline.com

[theemerged.livejournal.com]

Would that be the Rock of Ages, perchance?

Sorry, couldn't resist...

[manuka.livejournal.com]

LOL!

[mattcaron.livejournal.com]

Nifty. Thanks for explaining.

[manuka.livejournal.com]

It's an interesting business to be in. We're also a fairly tight-knit community because we're overworked and underpaid and are perfectly happy that way because we love what we do and get to work with some pretty great folks. This is one of the few jobs I've had in IT where the peasantry is genuinely appreciative of the job IT does.

Yeah, we still have some real winners on staff, but they frequently bring us cookies(or sometimes even better stuff! - one of our high-maintenance admins makes a banana bread that is so good and addictive that we are all certain that it contains pharmaceutical-grade crack), so we cut them some slack :) Some departments have even thrown us little appreciation parties and sent us gift baskets and stuff.

I can handle the users when they at least realize they make our brains hurt sometimes and offer compensation :)