Posted by Sidney Parker in Question for the Candidates – The Site Changeover

Posted by Admiral Joe P (Election Coodinator) in Question for the Candidates – The Site Changeover
These questions are for every ticket. Let’s give you all something topical to talk about, hmm?

Two weeks ago, we finally switched from our old site using Drupal 5 to our new site, after a lot of people spent a lot of time talking about doing that in various forms for the past 10 years or so. It was a big deal and affected everybody in the entire club. Even though we like to talk about this as a technical project, it was also an organizational one as well, which actually required the President and pretty much the entire club government to work together to get us through the switch. I don’t think we’ll have to change the site again, but we might come across problems that would need the same sort of coordination in the future, so I think it’s worth knowing how you all thought it went and what (if anything) you might do differently.

1. How do you think the change went? I mean specifically the event of changing from the old site to the new site that happened on June 23 of this year.
2. Imagine that you and your running mate were the President and Vice President this term. Is there anything you would have done differently than the current President and Vice President with regards to this change?

I know the second one there might be a little unfair to Sidney and Tony because their ticket doesn’t have any members of TECH on it and thus may not have the full context with which to answer (since there was lots of “behind the scenes” discussion before the thing kicked off), so I’ll allow any candidate to ask me for any context about the situation this term either publicly or privately before they give their “official” answer to that question.

I will ask follow up questions based upon your answers, most likely.

Joe

Thanks Joe for the questions. I want to preface this by saying I did take Joe up on his offer and emailed him specifically to get more information before answering. I had two questions I sent him and he answered. The first one was

1. I have been part, as a User, of big system change overs. Its always a bit of a cluster. The only thing that confused me was why we could not have made some kind of place to store the ships most current posts and then people just copy them back to the new site? I know with our systems they created a legacy area and you could go back and get reports, copy them from that location into the new system reports. Well the narratives not the individual data. So when we were required to do that ourselves and have the back ups it confused me some.

This was answered very well and Joe outlined the obstacles that prevented this from becoming a reality at the time of the changeover. However it is planned so we will have this in the near future so you can find that really great story line that you wrote years ago and want to reference now, or something like that.

1. I think there was plenty of warning it was coming but for many the actual day it hit caught some by surprise. I was called away on business and was gone for that week. I remembered I was able to post and saw no red flashing signs on the site that said on this date and on this hour its coming. Two days later I tried to log on and everything was different. I would have expected a big email campaign to let people know its about to hit. Like a Day 3, Day 2 and here it comes kinda thing. However as far as I know it did not happen. Am I getting this wrong and just missed it all?

Again Joe outlined this very well and I think some of this came down to individual timelines and being busy or in my case an unexpectant call away that made it impossible to check up on the site daily. However I do know that my link to the site took my directly to Fleet 5 and not to the Home page and as such I was not seeing the messages that were updating people. That was done for my convenience and I’m sure on the old site that many people did this as well.

So first I want to say that I am impressed that a group of TECH volunteers in coordination with the President pulled this off as well as they did. If you have never been part of a systems changeover then you might not know just how well this was done. Good job and given the complexity of it all and the opportunities for things to go way wrong you guys deserve kudos.

From a Presidents seat perspective I think it was done well also. I have no idea if this was done or not but my style would have been to come up with an Action Plan from the Presidents side of the coin. That action plan would gather data from TECH and whoever else and plot timelines and steps needed to be taken as well as contingencies. I would present that to my cabinet so we were all on the same page and then ask the Fcoms particularly to email update or post directly onto the Fleet MOTD’s a rough guideline of that plan and timelines as well as email CO’s as it progressed. I know this sounds over kill but in my former career, and on major projects that had large scale impact, then we always did this. It does not stop that unexpectant issue from coming up nor cure those that happen anyway but it puts everyone on the same page and at ease. It reduces confusion which can lead to more errors occurring or just downright frustration.

I am going to mention this but Tony will elaborate as it is his point. Maybe a central point of contact on Discord would have helped. I know I thought to ask questions but then said no. In my experience TECH would have been swamped with the changeover and asking them questions would not help them at that time. So I did what I could on the new site and waited for the dust to settle, which it did quickly, and sure enough most of my questions were already figured out so there was no need to ask them after all. Patience is hard but usually rewarded. However Tony really can explain his idea better and I think it is a great one.

So that is all for now. I’m sure I missed something but oeverall I think this conveys how I would have done things, which is to say not too much differently.

Sidney

Hey guys!

So I think overall, from my perspective of being a CO and aFComm, I think it all went fairly well. I spent quite a bit of time jumping in and out of discord to keep up with the progress. I get that it wasn’t supposed to take 5 hours to get it up and running, but TECH did great in getting things fixed and ready for our arrival!

I think they only thing I thought could have been done better (and I’m not saying this was something that was even all that bad), was the flow of info in discord. There were a few times I noted different people announcing what was going on. Sometimes it was a member of TECH, Prez, VP, etc. (Generally someone who wasn’t a regular person in discord). There were a few times I noticed similar questions being asked and different people responding. For the most part the info was right, but it was clear that there was an element of stress to it. Hearing the same questions, having to repeat things over and over. That stuff can get pretty taxing when their also doing other work for the transition.

I would have likely had an emergency plan in place, just in the off chance that things went really haywire. Specifically, I would have had one or two people “on shift” who were liasons between the people and those doing the work. Questions could have gone straight to the liason; liason would have the proper info to share based on what they had been told by TECH.

Whether or not it is a good idea is up for debate, but I would have considered setting it up myself. Or maybe it was attempted.

Overall, I think it went smoother than it could have. My point above wasn’t to try and nitpick. It was merely what I saw from my own point of view during that time. I think it all worked well, and the current administration took some steps to reduce what stress they could. (I do remember Dan, specifically, jumping in when things looked like it could get out of hand.)

-Tony