Beta notification process—Return to Last Known Good Configuration

Let’s Just Say it Went Badly

For those of you who were waiting for a beta notification for 71-669 today, I have a good idea what most of you are thinking: “Fail.” I can’t disagree with you. Believe me, if I had known what would happen, I never would have tried this experiment. I feel terrible that you were waiting for an e-mail that didn’t come when it should have. When you did finally get the notification, Prometric’s site got slammed as all of you tried to register at the same time.

Virtual Rotten Tomatoes

 I seriously considered hiding under a rock today. But I couldn’t find one quite big enough to hide me. I also tried to find a Web site where I could post my picture and you could throw virtual rotten tomatoes at me, but apparently I need to be a political pundit or a movie star to rate placement in such a game. (If you know of such a web site, feel free to put a link to it in the comments and I will gladly post my picture there.)

Return to Last Known Good Configuration

It’s clear that there are some significant drawbacks to waiting to send out the beta code notifications until the morning after registration opens. In retrospect, I see that it adds more dependencies than it removes--the cure was worse than the disease. Lesson learned. We won’t be making this a permanent change for how we notify people about beta exams. We’ll be returning to our Last Known Good Configuration, which is exactly the same as what we did this time—except I’ll send out the notifications containing the beta code about 2 business days prior to the registration start date.

If at First You Don’t Succeed, Try the phone

Several of you have suggested that Prometric needs to upgrade their infrastructure in order to deal with the traffic when a beta opens. I’ll certainly discuss that with them, but an alternative is for us to switch the balance of the traffic to calling Prometric rather than registering on the web site. If in the future you can’t get through immediately on Prometric’s site, try the phone instead. It sounds like that’s how most people have been successful so far today, though now I hear that the call centers in Europe are already closed.

Proverbial Second Guessing

Today’s experience has almost killed my desire to improve processes altogether. I can’t help but think:

• I should have left well enough alone.
• If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

But then again, there’s also:

• Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
• If at first you don’t succeed, Try, Try again.
• There’s always tomorrow for dreams to come true (oh wait, that’s Disney, not proverb).