I’ve Had IT and I’m Calling People OUT
National Operations 5 Comments 
2020 NCS, cei, gsusa, strongly worded letter, vtk
Addendum 8/20/20: GSUSA has indirectly reached out to me about these issues, so I am going to document them and get them shipped back.
Addendum 10/4/20: I actually ended up having a Zoom meeting with 3 GSUSA VTK staffers and we discussed the overall issues I see, so whaddya know! Let’s see what the future holds!
I normally do not write blog posts while I am “emotional” per se, but I have had it with this issue that has been bothering me for three years now – and that is the laziness when it comes to what is being rolled out for VTK (Volunteer Toolkit). Yes, LAZINESS. I don’t know where the breakdown is happening whether it’s on the development or project management level, but it infuriates me every time I see it, and I’ve been seeing it continuously since I created this inane series of videos about VTK back in 2017.
So what triggered this? Earlier today, I read where the Girls Guides may be phased out. The writer mentioned VTK (and said it had changed for the better), and since I hadn’t checked it out since they rolled out the new stuff a few weeks ago, I logged in and started browsing around.
Then I saw this under the Resources tab for Badge & Journey Meeting Plan and lost my mind:
See the tiny icon with a slash through it? That’s called a broken image. There could be a variety of reasons for it. In this case, it’s because it looks like the file icon.S17OJ05.png hasn’t been uploaded to the server according to the source code. Seriously?? Someone forgot to upload the file?? But it shouldn’t even be there in the first place because there are double entries!!
So just now, I went back to VTK after documenting this bug, and of course I was already logged out. I’ll get to that later. So I logged BACK in and went to the Year Plan where I had previously added badges to my plan… and I got this message:
All of the badges I had added were gone. Yeah. I found more bugs, but I’m not going to document them all here.
But here’s another issue from the Badge Explorer that’s shown up at some point. So now, when you render a PDF, it adds an additional blank page after each one. And my OCD notes that the text in the header for the first column is too large. This is the first two pages of five total:
Here’s the file if you want to see it. FWIW, it renders properly when created in Firefox, but not Chrome or Edge. Go figure. By the way, I reported this one to GSUSA via their Contact Us link and was actually assigned a case number: 07369202 or ref:_00DG0leqU._5006f1aQYyR:ref. I’m not sure which one it is.
Is NOBODY testing anything in development AND when it gets rolled out to production? There is NO EXCUSE for this!! All you need is someone to spend some time using the application and attempt to root out bugs and make sure everything renders properly. Just one person could do it. It should be part of the development process. It took me less than 5 minutes to find that first one on the Resources tab!
The reason this gnaws at me so much is because I’m a former IT professional. I was part of a team that rolled out applications enterprise-wide. I’ve also done application testing and documentation at three different IT companies. What I have seen over and over and over again for three years now when it comes to VTK would have cost people’s jobs where I worked. Maybe I get so hot about this because I’m having flashbacks to battling developers to “FIX IT AND FIX IT NOW.” I admit my nickname at the time was “Angry Amy.”
I don’t know if this is happening in other parts of the IT system/CEI that council staff access, but I do know we’re paying a hefty price for it, and this shouldn’t be happening. I don’t care if we are a non-profit and we’re held to lower standards than for-profit companies. Developers who write code and apps for FREE do better work than this. This is OUR MONEY in the form of membership dues and online store revenue, and PEOPLE NEED TO BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE FOR THIS SHODDY DEVELOPMENT WORK. I bring this up in my post about why the National Council should be the authority for membership dues in reason number five: “Is GSUSA doing its due diligence with the IT contractors and vendors and holding them accountable, or is it letting them slide by with things such as numerous bugs in the Volunteer Toolkit that should be fixed before being released? Are we negotiating the best rate? If the National Board has the freedom to raise dues as much as it wants, there would be no incentive to keep spending in check and making sure every dollar is spent wisely.”
What I see here also makes me very nervous about a virtual National Council Session. Hopefully its development isn’t being treated as flippantly as this work is.
I realize I sound very harsh. GSUSA has thrown a lot of work into things and made updates to VTK over the past few years and I recognize that. But I always spot (and report) bug after bug after bug after every update. Now that I can report them directly via GSUSA’s Contact Us, I’ll be doing that versus going through my poor council who had to create a case on their end and send it to GSUSA. We’ll see if the one I reported above ever gets fixed or if I get a return answer from whomever they relayed it to.
AND STOP LOGGING ME OUT SO QUICKLY FROM VTK!! Sometimes I get busy and have to come back to it later, and there’s no frickin’ reason that I should be logged out! It’s not like I’m accessing bank records or national secrets!! Angry Amy OUT!
You go girl!
RotFLoL… Hopefully your blog post will be seen by BOARD members (not just bored members) and they will start thinking about the IT performance in their own companies that got them placed on the GS Board. It would be a hard press to find this level of complacency and poor user (member AKA Customer) interface happening in their For Profit organizations. Badges (heads) would roll (if they weren’t rectangle, triangle or whatever shape those Ambassador awards are)….and stuff would be easy for the Customer to use.
But wait, scouting is not the real world of business and our professionals on staff, especially in IT are anything but, professional. There’s no performance incentive to DO WELL in GSUSA so there’s no extra reward for employees to chase – which would include managing the KPIs of the vendor. And if they KPIs ARE being met – whoever contracted for this should not be on the payroll. VTK was supposed to be the ultimate FOR the volunteer – an easy tool to use. There’s another scouting organization working on merging eight or twelve different legacy systems into one – it’s frustrating but the systems WORK and that scouting organization has a much higher level of accountability it places on the volunteers (i.e. a volunteer cannot go in and buy a badge without proof that badge has been recorded in the national database…..) I digress.
Bottom line, VTK takes too much time for the average volunteer (YOU are not Average Amy) to figure out because after they struggle with getting logged out while trying to find out, they shout out in frustration and give up. What I hate is clicking on the badge image thinking I’m going to get some help and I’m taken to the STORE site…. No. When I did dabble in it, I found some long and poorly written “resources” that just made me wonder who had the time to put that all together and did they really get paid for it? Volunteers do not have time to weed through – volunteers are the paying staff on the front line with the girl program – YES Amy – you should be catered to and all your issues resolved by those who get paid to support the front line worker (the volunteer)…..
Yes. This. Preach it! I’m tired of arguing about the issues in an endless line of complaints and problems.
Thanks for the link. I agree 100% with what you said. I wish VTK did not require adding a badge to meeting plans before viewing the plans and that it allowed us to slice and dice–i want to have a meeting that does 2 requirements from this badge and one from that one.
As a former Project Manager I would have been fired along with my whole team if I was responsible for a project like this. It is abundantly clear the requirements were poorly written and QA and user acceptance testing was non existent. The fact it hasn’t met the minimum requirements to manage anyone of my three troops makes it absolutely useless and a gigantic waste of money.