jharlow said:
Perhaps to offer a slight counterpoint to the prevailing anti tahdah sentiment, this is by the sound of things the same system which the Mountain Training Association uses for all of it's climbing and mountain leading awards. In my experience, the system is easy to use, practical, and well suited to the purpose both for candidates and instructors. If we get the similar DLOG, course and assessment booking page, and award registration system out of those ?5000, I may well finally consider undertaking the LCMLA.
Frankly, other database systems might be just as apt at data storage, but if we get the same kind of user experience that MTA candidates receive out of tahdah I will consider the money well spent.
The system BCA Training needs is very close to the Mountain Leader Training Board requirements and MLTB has been using Tahdah for 18 months now. It is not just database but is able to deal with electronic log books, certificates, etc. as well as keeping track of the people involved in the various schemes, their update requirements at 2- or 3- year intervals, etc.
The problems with the existing system were first flagged up in
2009 and a search was started for a replacement and also something which would enable more of the processing to be done automatically.
On
15 Oct. 2011, there is an
Action 80b on Council:
NB [Nigel Ball, the Training Officer] to put together a written specification of the requirements for a new database and submit it to Executive for their approval.
However, Action 80b does not figure in any future meeting and seems to have inadvertently been dropped, although Nigel Ball and Mary Wilde were working on it throughout.
In
June 2014 the BCA IT Working Group Report says:
With thanks to Nigel Ball and Mary Wilde I now have the Training Database requirements documents and examples of the current training databases. Once I have completed my review of those, I will propose a way or ways forward for the Training Committee?s consideration.
However, nothing more was heard from the IT Working Group after this, no proposals were ever sent to the Training Committee by the ITWG and nothing appears to have been done by them. Leaving the Training Committee to try to sort out the problem for itself.
The present system is only operating with some difficulty and a considerable amount of trouble-shooting by the Training Administrator; to process anything takes far longer than it should do. Plus, because everything is on paper, there is the cost of postage of certificates, log books, etc. - all of which would be saved by a new system. The system needed has to cope with the training requirements for LTMLA and CIC, the Trainer Assessors, the whole updating system (think DVLA and car insurance/registration) and produce electronic certificates. Because the Tahdah system already does this kind of thing and was working so well for MLTB, it was investigated by the Training Officer and Training Administrator as a possible answer for BCA Training requirements, beginning in the summer of 2016 when it was realised that much more than a "database system" was possible. Still no input received from the BCA ITWG, despite their June 2014 report saying they would "review ... put forward a proposal ... etc."!
A report on this was sent to the BCA Secretary to go to BCA Council in October 2016 but the report was somehow "lost" and never presented to Council - hence the total surprise at the Council meeting in January 2017 when the Tahdah system was brought forward as the solution BCA Training needed. The "loss" of an important report to Council the previous October seems to have been a problem related to the new BCA Secretarial setup not working properly - probably nobody's "fault" - but not good for BCA's image and certainly creating real problems down the line for the Training Committee who are now getting the flack for the failure of others. It did not help the situation either to have the ITWG members disagreeing with each other on points of fact during this most recent Council Meeting.
BCA has not covered itself with glory over this! We are an amateur organisation attempting to run a professional qualification with a hopelessly out-of-date system which badly needs replacing. The specification was written in 2014 but has since been updated as it became possible to find software which would do much more of the task automatically. The final update of the specification is due by the end of April and is already being worked on.
It is totally unrealistic to expect something like this to be written "in house" by an IT Working Group doing it in their spare time. The AGM in June will have the final say on this, that's why the deadlines were set, because it's long past time that this was sorted out and the Training Committee has been trying to do so via the BCA and/or the IT Working Group since 2009.
The alternative is that the whole training certification system collapses and a large number of people are left with no way of obtaining the qualifications necessary for them to carry on working.