The Waiting Game – Almost LIVE!

We’ve been waiting. Waiting waiting. We’re anticipating going live with Continuum, our new database, any minute now. But any minute now has been going on for a while.

September 9th, we received access to the test database, and were able to start playing in the system. I started my training with a few fellow staff members and began the long task of training our staff. I say long not because the database is hard to understand, but because we had many people to train to do many different functions. Nevermind the fact that we are training people who can work in the old system in their sleep. I can understand being reluctant to change. But I started off our initial training with a quote from Seth Godin on his blog:

It’s easy to be against something that you’re afraid of. And it’s easy to be afraid of something that you don’t understand.

My hope was that with training, everyone on staff would begin to understand our new database and not be afraid anymore. I think we’re almost there. Once we’re live, and everyone starts work, we’ll all be functioning in Continuum in our sleep. It’s a MUCH easier system to use, it’s more intuitive, and over the course of time will allow us to process things more quickly. No more hand entering applications we receive from the web. Just print and file. No more wondering if a student is ready for review, the system just tells you. AND NO MORE BORING E-MAIL! The feature I’m most excited about it the availability to send HTML e-mail to more specific populations of our students, making for better yield (I hope).

Our staff has been trained (mostly) and we submitted the final data file. No more entering into Power CAMPUS. Just waiting.

Now that we’re waiting, I think I’m getting more excited and yet more nervous. There are all kinds of things that could go wrong. I hope they won’t, and I think they won’t, but what if? Nevermind the fact we’ve been waiting to go live all week (so no data has been entered into ANY system). If we don’t go live this week, I may be hurt severely. I’m thinking about wearing a shirt that says “No, we don’t have a database yet.” What do you think?