topic Re: Who is responsible for this awful web CPE portal? in Member Support

Who is responsible for this awful web CPE portal?

green20151 — Sat, 30 Jun 2018 17:39:00 GMT

I really have to ask. Who accepted the CPE portal as it is now? I feel badly contacting Customer Support with issues, as I know they certainly did not approve this terrible "portal" which cannot even provide the titles of your submitted credits (heaven help you if you have more than 1 activity in a day).

Some middle manager was probably told to get it redesigned by some impossible date and stuck with no budget. Or maybe they were told that the needs of members to be able to submit CPEs was less important than the bean counting of what activities get what kinds of credits. As a QA professional, if I were associated with the CPE Portal, I would be ashamed.

I am somewhat disgusted since one would think with all of the prestigious organizations and vendors, and software development companies involved with ISC2 and the CISSP, you would have had a CPE portal that was efficient, easy to use, and user friendly. It's really awful. Did you pay someone money to develop this?

Re: Who is responsible for this awful web CPE portal?

denbesten — Sun, 01 Jul 2018 13:43:32 GMT

This webinar offers some insight as to the likely pressure. I suspect that the lowest-bid contractor was used to develop the site and that the developers understand their tools much better than they understand the process of CPE management.

A few tricks that make it more tolerable until version 2 is released (in 2019, per (ISC)²):

Altering your window width tends to change how things appear. Either side of 20cm seems to be where it switches between tablet to desktop modes. Sometimes one is nicer; sometimes the other.
The "View CPEs" mode can be copy-pasted into Word to make it a bit easier to manage. Notably This results in the entire title being displayed.
When entering CPEs, never click "save and exit". "Save and Continue" is the correct choice. Also, you are not done until you have reached a "finished" button, clicked it and received confirmation.

Re: Who is responsible for this awful web CPE portal?

Chuxing — Mon, 02 Jul 2018 02:49:20 GMT

Being a project manager, I tend to think that there probably several junctures where project went off track. First place is the scope, and possibly not very tight and well developed. Then the testing phase, where the testing plan is either not well formulated and/or executed. Then the delivery should not be accepted, if indeed it has been.

Fixing a half-baked application project could be challenging, depending on the original design and if any changes have added.

Hopefully detailed lessons learned have been recorded, otherwise all would be wasted.

Just my uneducated conjectures ...

Re: Who is responsible for this awful web CPE portal?

denbesten — Mon, 02 Jul 2018 03:59:10 GMT

I suspect you underestimate the scope of the project. It appears that CPE submission is part of a larger CRM (customer relationship manager) migration to the cloud. Amongst the reasons they did this is to protect against bad Florida weather. My guess is their goal was to migrate prior to hurricane season, which they seem to have beat by two months.

One comparatively small workstream (the CPE custom app) being a bit janky probably was not enough justification to roll back an entire CRM migration. As awkward as we all feel it to be, the current portal does its fundamental job -- enabling CPE submission, especially with the tricks we have collectively found and with customer support's ability to keep up with the exceptional cases.

I do agree, however that it would be a good PR move for (ISC)² management to issue a statement summarizing the migration project, including the high-level goals that have been achieved and what we can expect to see in the upcoming months.

Re: Who is responsible for this awful web CPE portal?

Jesse_Mundis — Fri, 13 Jul 2018 16:52:53 GMT

The previous one wasn't great, but it had a sort of late-90s-era, bare-bones, retro-charm to it, and was usable, if klunky. The current one is ... not good.

I do hope the folks implementing this are hearing the feedback and working on improvements.

Re: Who is responsible for this awful web CPE portal?

lsimmons — Mon, 16 Jul 2018 13:39:49 GMT

In every organization I've ever dealt with where this kind of IT debacle occurred, managers got fired.

It boils down to accountability. Anyone associated with a "go-live" decision which negatively impacts tens of thousands of people like this one should be let go.

They have no business being associated with an organization which (supposedly) embodies the use of IT best practices.

Clearly, no one at (ISC)2 is considered accountable. Otherwise, there would be consequences.

Re: Who is responsible for this awful web CPE portal?

Steve-Wilme — Tue, 17 Jul 2018 06:49:27 GMT

Viewing your active transcript appears to list out all CPEs chronologically, which makes it a little easier. What really gets me though is that the CPEs no longer add up or match the published CPE requirements. The figures for my CISSP concentrations are just miscalculated as 20 CPEs each over 3 years.

Re: Who is responsible for this awful web CPE portal?

Flyslinger2 — Thu, 19 Jul 2018 11:24:21 GMT

Anticipating my certification in the next "Please allow 6 weeks for your submission to be reviewed and processed..." timeframe (it just started yesterday).

Do I need to create a spreadsheet to track my CPE's? Sounds like I need a system for the system.

Re: Who is responsible for this awful web CPE portal?

green20151 — Thu, 19 Jul 2018 21:25:13 GMT

Do you need a spreadsheet to track your CPE's?
Yes.

Congratulations on your new certification.

Re: Who is responsible for this awful web CPE portal?

denbesten — Thu, 19 Jul 2018 23:51:13 GMT

CPEs must be earned during your certification cycle which does not begin
until after you have been completely endorsed. Until that happens (either 6
or 10 weeks from now - - it always is the 1st day of a month), you can bask
in the carefree CPE-free life.

Re: Who is responsible for this awful web CPE portal?

dswomley — Mon, 23 Jul 2018 07:01:07 GMT

Also a project manager......I am glad to have found this line of discussion......I have been feeling the same way, and actually complained rather loudly and repeatedly when the new site was deployed in the midst of an online course I was taking. I don't like to be a complainer, as I'm sure most of us feel, having been on projects that at some point, didn't go well. But, as you mentioned......for an organization as proudly public and professional as it is, (ISC)2 and/or its vendor dropped the ball on this one.

It seems there was little to no Human Factors consideration here. The outcome is non-intuitve and less than usefu to members.

Re: Who is responsible for this awful web CPE portal?

dswomley — Mon, 23 Jul 2018 07:05:37 GMT

except when it's not the first! lol Mine (CISSP) is 13th of the month, go figure. 🙂

Re: Who is responsible for this awful web CPE portal?

Bryiantan — Mon, 30 Jul 2018 03:19:31 GMT

Kudos! thanks for having the courage to bring up this topic.I still like the old portal even though it less fancy but it served its purpose.

Re: Who is responsible for this awful web CPE portal?

mcfwong — Tue, 28 Aug 2018 03:48:17 GMT

@Bryiantan wrote:
Kudos! thanks for having the courage to bring up this topic.I still like the old portal even though it less fancy but it served its purpose.

It was designed to fancy the executives who signed the paycheck ? Shouldn't be the end-user experience the No. 1 priority ? I am fully disappointed with this portal and can't believe a professional organization like (ISC)2 will have such work. It is s shame, thumb down !

Re: Who is responsible for this awful web CPE portal?

CISO-Italiano — Tue, 04 Sep 2018 08:53:57 GMT

(ISC)² give us back the old portal. This is awfully unusable and it's a big step back in comparison to the very concise dashboard we had before. Please rollback asap until a better solution is found. This is not resistance to change, this is resistance to worsening UX.

Re: Who is responsible for this awful web CPE portal?

lucasm — Wed, 05 Sep 2018 12:40:21 GMT

I agree. This is the worst portal I have ever encountered. Bring back the old and fire the manager.

Re: Who is responsible for this awful web CPE portal?

Jezza — Sun, 06 Nov 2022 22:51:17 GMT

I logged in today after not having done so for many months. I can't remember the portal being as bad as it is now. It is so hard to navigate anywhere. I previously had MFA turned on, this had been turned off and I had to re-enable it. I found it so hard to find the CPE dashboard to submit a CPE... had to Google it... it wasn't intuitive at all. Then being in an Australian time zone, I tried to submit a CPE, and it says "Date cannot be in the future" ?! This is on 7th November... despite it being 9am on 7th November in Sydney.

To log a complaint, you need to Google that as well to find the contact details.

Finding a place to change time zone settings was like pulling teeth... I eventually found this link:

https://community.isc2.org/t5/user/myprofilepage/tab/user-preferences

changed the timezone, but it made no difference.

If you follow the FAQ, it says to go to:

https://www.isc2.org/Dashboard/Preferences

but there is no place here to change the timezone settings.

On some pages the ISC2 logo has a hyperlink and others it doesn't. Its absolutely terrible... huge big banners everywhere, like a 1st year Uni student's first attempt to develop a website.

Whoever did it has like morphed 3 websites into one and none are in sync.

There is another place to change timezone settings here:

https://learn.isc2.org/d2l/lp/preferences/preferences_main/preferences_main.d2l?ou=6606

and guess what this was already set to Sydney AEST, so didn't help with the CPE issue.

Oh my gosh, please, please re-design this website from the ground up... its terrible !!!!!

Don't take my word for it... put together a survey and ask user's opinion !

Re: Who is responsible for this awful web CPE portal?

Clipper — Wed, 20 Dec 2023 14:37:07 GMT

We are at the end of 2023 and this portal is still utter crap. I can reliably enter my THREE YEARS CPEs and so it does not even let me pay my AMF. This is simply ridiculous.

- HUGE fonts everywhere and HUGE white space is such a waste, our screens are bigger and bigger and we see less and less information

- Saving the CPE leaves a draft record which seems empty. Coming back to that record actually proves it's empty

- Why a MULTI-SCREENS of 6 sequential steps for one single CPE ??

This is madness and a shame that after 5 years it's still totally utter crap..

Re: Who is responsible for this awful web CPE portal?

Steve-Wilme — Wed, 20 Dec 2023 16:16:27 GMT

As an ex backend coder UX wasn't exactly my thing either LOL.

Perhaps they should take a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Design_of_Everyday_Things