Much needed madness break, complete with new program whine in shiny things

After months of work-overload, suddenly it’s…quiet. Really quiet. May graduates are either done and gone, or they still have shortages that they are currently ignoring so they aren’t bombarding me. Their deadline is June 17 to get everything cleared up so they’re doubtless all waiting till June 16 1\2 to freak out. August and December graduates are nowhere near panic time, so are also leaving me alone. Graduation clearance has kind of become my only job - or at least my biggest job, the one I spend most of my time by far on - so with that area all peaceful, I’m oddly at loose ends.

We are supposed to be using this kind-of-down-time (we’re all in a lull, it being summer session) to get started on yet another new computer system. We’re going paperless, which is great - I hate files! I hate filing! I hate digging around hunting stuff that ought to be online!! - but.... let’s just say our training has been far from optimal. Well, not just our training - the whole implementation thing has been bizarrely done. You’d think that going paperless would be something that the whole university would be doing as one, with the university doing the purchasing and everyone getting the same training and everyone following some sort of.... protocol. Like we did with Banner and DegreeWorks. But with Fortis, the paperless system.... no. It’s up to each college/department within the university whether to use it or not. And each college/department pays for it themselves, which is also an issue for small departments with an even smaller budget than the rest of us. Like the Honors College, whose entire budget would be wiped out.

SO, the Registrar’s Office is using it. Financial Aid is. Admissions is - and I think they were the first, actually, and have been using it for quite some time. A few other areas are. The Dean’s Offices are mostly going to use it, but have wildly varying time frames for implementation. One of them actually bought everything and did the training last summer… but never could start using Fortis because it wasn’t compatible with Macs, and most of them had Macs. If you’re wondering why nobody pointed this out before they bought the licenses and the scanners and did the training.... well, so am I, and sadly it looks like that may be kind of the norm. Supposedly the Mac issue is fixed - or at least has a work-around - but Mr. Organized in my office has a Mac and is having problems.

Anyway. We spent three days in training this week. And by “three days” I mean a few hours of the 9:00-4:00 each day we’d all blocked off, and by “training” I mean sitting in a computer room being shown on a screen and following along on our computers what we’d be doing if we were the Fortis Campus Administration people and how we’d be setting up the system if we were the Fortis Campus Administration people but which we won’t actually be doing ourselves since we are in fact not the Fortis Campus Administration people so they’ll be doing that for us but hey we need to know what they do despite it not being something we’ll be doing ever! All that at the breakneck speed of light. With no time to take notes lest we get lost in the maze of what we will not in fact be doing.

Well, that was for two days. Or part-days, the little portion of what we’d actually allotted for training and assumed would be used for training. We did kind of learn how picklists are set up. Or at least how they would be set up if you were selling cars and had a group of cars with a picklist of makes and another picklist of models and a final pickist of colors. That would be great if we were selling cars. But we are not selling cars, and what we never did learn was how exactly the material in the student files that we have in our office will be translated into paperless files we can all access.

I’m no program trainer, but if I was a program trainer, it seems that the obvious logical place to start would have been in our office. Where we could sit down, explain what exactly we do and demonstrate the contents of our real-world files and how stuff flows and put together an idea of how it will need to be set up in Fortis so that it’s accessible and easy to find and easy to share and it all makes sense. Actually at this point in the whole Fortis Administration Project, that would have been a quick and simple first step, since several other Deans’ Offices have already been trained and we do pretty much the same things they do, so our set-up would be quite similar and possibly identical. Then we could have been trained to create the documents and the layers and the picklists and everything else we STILL HAVE NO CLUE ABOUT. And perhaps the extended training on the stuff we will not actually be doing ourselves since we’re not Fortis Campus Administration people could have been relegated to the final step. Because it’s good to know how things are working behind the scenes, but it basically meant nothing to us the way it was presented since we still don’t understand properly how it will work for us, let alone how the behind-the-scenes stuff we won’t ever be doing works.

So yesterday the trainer did come to our office. And set Fortis up on all our computers. (On a slight side note, I have a brand new computer!!!!!! After being told the state reneged on the money for new computers, suddenly it was un-reneged on and I have a fast, non-crashing, working computer!!! And it was installed yesterday morning just in time for the Fortis installation. ) We were all under the impression that the trainer would then work with us on setting up our documents so we can start figuring out how we’ll be using it, but - no!!! Apparently we’re on our own with that! Somehow I’ve ended up being the Tech Admin in our office (hahahahahaha!) and she’s like, “Well, now you can set up the documents! Bye!!!!” and that was IT. Fortunately we’re all dazed by this and we’re setting down next week and figuring out how they will need to be set up for our own particular uses- which, yeah, we assumed was the Fortis Person’s job. The actual making of the documents shouldn’t be difficult - and there are handbooks online - but our huge missing piece is how it should be set up for US. Vs how it should be set up for a car salesman.

And… nothing works!!! Aggravation Receptionist has the dedicated scanner that the Fortis people told us to buy- and it doesn’t recognize Fortis. Our office copier is also a scanner, and the trainer supposedly set that up so the rest of us can use it when needed, and the instructions she sent today for it make no sense. The folder we need to use on that scanner does not appear to exist. There’s another thing we are all supposed to install so we’ll get notifications when stuff appears in our inboxes— and it won’t install. Mr. Organized’s Mac won’t work with Fortis although it’s supposed to. And the trainer is gone to a conference for the next week so can’t help us with any of this till she returns. By then we’ll have forgotten what little information did sink in from the “training”.

On the plus side, I think when we all figure out exactly how it needs to work, and get started on it, it won’t be difficult. Once we navigate the gargantuan missing pieces.