Who is responsible for this awful web CPE portal?

[green20151]

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?  

[denbesten]

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):

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.

[Chuxing]

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 ...

[denbesten]

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.

[Jesse_Mundis]

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.

[lsimmons]

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.

[Steve-Wilme]

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.  

[Flyslinger2]

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.

[green20151]

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

Congratulations on your new certification.

[denbesten]

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.