Bloodbath Postmortem
SAIS, I gave you a chance. I had held out hope that you won’t screw the UPLB student body over. I tried to believe that you are not as shitty as I think you can possibly be. Yet you broke that trust and have proven that I was an idiot for doing so.
The front end part of the system, what we unlucky users see, was already disappointing. It lagged and it wasn’t intuitive. The mock enrollment a few months ago showed that it took 27 clicks just to add the usual six subjects if you don’t have their class codes, which even if you did, would still take eighteen or so clicks. Nobody couldn’t fathom why in the world a registration system has a fucking shopping cart.
For a background on what happened, in case you have no idea what the hell I’m talking about, you can refer to my previous post here.
As much as I would love to burn SAIS to the ground and banish its remains to the very depths of hell to be used as toilet paper by the devil for all eternity, there could have been a way to make online registration successful without having to switch back to SystemOne. UP Manila managed to survive this past two years using it after all. In my opinion, what led to the disaster was mismanagement on the part of whoever coordinated this entire operation. It baffles me how a university so well respected in this country, said to be the top university of the republic, can let this happen. So here’s my two cents on some steps that could have been taken to avoid what happened repeating itself in the future.
Before I do so however, I would like to make it clear that never was I involved with the SAIS team, the UPLB Registration Team, nor the SystemOne development team. I do not claim to have perfect knowledge of how online registration is carried out behind the scenes, so take everything I say from this point on with a grain of salt.
In my opinion, the one of the biggest mistakes (the biggest mistake shall come later) for me was the failure to create a centralized Facebook group long before registration. In my opinion, the group should have been created around the time during mock enrollment last semester. Had it been done so, students would have a single authoritative source for information which they could confidently believe in and ask questions to right from the start, not the mishmash of various groups disseminating information.
Yes, the SAIS team has email. There’s also the eUP helpdesk. Those are resources we could have looked to for information. But they should know their users. Most students don’t bother with sending questions through email, we’d rather do it through Facebook. The advantage of having questions posted on a group rather than through email is that other people can benefit view the questions and the answers to those questions.
In my opinion, the July 29 registration should never have pushed through. The previous night’s registration already showed that SAIS already lagged when being used by graduating students who comprise a small portion of the population. What more when the regular students use it? It should have been painfully that SAIS could not handle a large load. Yet as we all know, the registration pushed through.
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Come registration on July 29, it crashed. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the SAIS team only decided to speak up after those two hours. We would have appreciated getting even short status updates like “SAIS servers are down and we are doing our best to look into the problem.” At least assure us that you actually exist and that we have not gone insane.
The single update they posted, the text of which is included below, after those two hours of silence was the biggest failure that led to catastrophe.
For those asking, SAIS will be back up tomorrow morning or rather later in the morning as it is 2:00am already.
The Team is working on SAIS.
Thank you and I apologize for the late announcement. I also apologize for keeping you all up at this hour.
The estimated time is at 9:00 am.
Will keep you posted.
People decided to go to sleep because of this post, thinking that the servers would stay down until 9:00 AM. They didn’t. Because a large number of people went to sleep, the load on the servers was largely decreased, and SAIS became usable to the few who stayed awake. And those active few took the opportunity to take the slots now up for grabs.
Those who slept woke up learning that they had slept through a chance to get much needed slots and that some classes had become full. This one mistake by the SAIS team hurt their already damaged credibility even more so.
It’s sad to think that this could have been avoided if the SAIS team decided to keep the servers fucking down till 9:00 AM. Not only did they destroy what little trust we had in them, they have left our futures in the hands of random chance.
Yes the easiest solution is to switch back to SystemOne. I agree that this never would have happened if we never switched to SAIS. Yet the powers that be at Quezon Hall do not want us to do things our way. There is no guarantee that we will be getting SystemOne back so we have to make do while we fight as we UP students always do. I just ask the SAIS team to learn from this and not let us suffer to this degree again.
