Just something to keep in mind...

Having already made a possibly unkind remark in this forum in relation to the financial system transition, I'd like to be the first to recognize the efforts of the employees who doubtlessly spent many hours of testing and coding before this change went into effect. I'd like to thank those who listened to the "red flag raisers" in August and held a focus group at HQ to help soften the transition before its delayed implementation now. I can only imagine what this would have been like without it.

Yes, it appears that some things weren't crystal clear, and I may lose a few hours with my family to try and straighten it out, but in short, I'd just like to remind everyone that we're all human. I'll also take my mini-soapbox here to remind everyone of the One in whose employ we do this work. That's all too easy to forget when we're trying our best to "render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s".

It will all work out. I'm sure a little prayer won't hurt before we start to dive into this. I know that's something I forgot at first...

oregonmatt wrote: I'd like to be the first to recognize the efforts of the employees who doubtlessly spent many hours of testing and coding before this change went into effect.

And don't forget those poor souls at LUS who will probably be receiving a lot of strident phone calls from clerks over the next few weeks.

mlh78 wrote:And don't forget those poor souls at LUS who will probably be receiving a lot of strident phone calls from clerks over the next few weeks.

Yes, I actually had them primarily in my mind when I wrote this. I wonder where that part of my sentence went... :p

I was actually thinking of calling them and just thanking them for what they do, and if I didn't think that would tie up the line for a more important concern, I would do that.

Actually this is a good time to remind everyone as well that they should attempt to work out their issues with their Assistant Stake Clerk over finances and let them call support if they need it. (We'll all also be here as a community - as long as the server stays up... )

oregonmatt wrote:Having already made a possibly unkind remark in this forum in relation to the financial system transition, I'd like to be the first to recognize the efforts of the employees who doubtlessly spent many hours of testing and coding before this change went into effect. I'd like to thank those who listened to the "red flag raisers" in August and held a focus group at HQ to help soften the transition before its delayed implementation now. I can only imagine what this would have been like without it.

Yes, it appears that some things weren't crystal clear, and I may lose a few hours with my family to try and straighten it out, but in short, I'd just like to remind everyone that we're all human. I'll also take my mini-soapbox here to remind everyone of the One in whose employ we do this work. That's all too easy to forget when we're trying our best to "render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s".

It will all work out. I'm sure a little prayer won't hurt before we start to dive into this. I know that's something I forgot at first...

I couldn't have said this better. We all need to be grateful for the efforts of others in our behalf and remember the 10 lepers.

I am grateful for everything they are doing but I do wish that they had taken more time to write support documents. The ones we had were to general. This is positive criticism and hopefully will help avoid problems in the future.

The problem with any transition is often in communication between those involved. The change to CUBS is awesome and I am so excited about the new changes and improvements.

We probably should have had a website that clerks and leaders could have accessed discussing the changes and allowing us to see how it would look before changes were made so we could comment and asked questions.

There could have been a lot of screenshots and tutorials that explained the changes since its fairly easy to create these things.

With the http://www.new.lds.org site it would have been possible to create this section for clerks to access and it may be a good idea to do in advance of any possible changes in the future which I am sure there will be and I am sure they will be awesome.

Thanks for these improvements and keep them coming

Edward Lalone wrote:I am grateful for everything they are doing but I do wish that they had taken more time to write support documents. The ones we had were too general. This is positive criticism and hopefully will help avoid problems in the future.

I agree, especially because a couple-line addition to also print out the budget report before the transition would have saved a bunch of headaches, but I'm approaching it now as "what's done is done". I'm sure everyone involved will learn something from this experience for "next time". Until "next time" we'll all work together here to pick up the pieces we have now and move on...

We had bad weather overnight. We had strong, noisy winds in Northern Utah and the power was off for six hours. If the support people who had to take angry phone calls were as tired as I was BEFORE going to work today...

I needed to call support about something completely unrelated to the MLS changes and, alas, there was no getting through today. I wonder when I ever will.

GregAnderson wrote:We had bad weather overnight. We had strong, noisy winds in Northern Utah and the power was off for six hours. If the support people who had to take angry phone calls were as tired as I was BEFORE going to work today...

I needed to call support about something completely unrelated to the MLS changes and, alas, there was no getting through today. I wonder when I ever will.

Just two quick comments. One, the group that help the focus group really wanted to hold more but sounds like they ran out of time. They were putting in 80 hour weeks just to get it released before the end of October.

Two, this is the first time I've ever just gotten a straight up busy signal from LUS! Not even put on hold! Unrelated issue, but I do not envy them this week!

crislapi wrote:Two, this is the first time I've ever just gotten a straight up busy signal from LUS! Not even put on hold! Unrelated issue, but I do not envy them this week!

I've lost my sense of urgency in trying to figure this out. My plan is to wait at least until after the next CUFS arrives, and possibly wait until after the new handbook is rolled out November 13, 2010 just in case there are any important policy changes. After that, I can begin in earnest to get every thing back up to speed before December 1, 2010. In the mean time we can still process donations and write checks via MLS. Everything else can be fixed with a little patience after the dust settles.

crislapi wrote:Just two quick comments. One, the group that help the focus group really wanted to hold more but sounds like they ran out of time. They were putting in 80 hour weeks just to get it released before the end of October.

That's really the impression I got from you folks who were kind enough to go in and do a "dry run" with them. Since the biggest problem seems to have been simply a documentation error (not realizing that printing the Income and Expense report doesn't include budget data) I'm actually fairly impressed with how they've managed quite a gargantuan change in the way finances are handled in this software.