Quote Originally Posted by Greg Phillips View Post
With all due respect Walter, I am sure we do not know what is going on behind the scenes and know what is needed or wanted. But with a system that is "correctly" built and put in place it shouldn't add any steps in terms of back-end registration and honestly should make back and front end administration twice as easy.
I am willing to bet that if this system was in place and you left mail/fax/email registration you would see that more than 20% of your members would use it. Thinking that only 20% would use it I think is a bit off. I am also open to hear in what ways in the back-end (because I honestly don't know what is going on) that this would add any additional steps. I find it hard to believe that Nancy enjoys printing out all those forms, organizing them and dealing with all that leading up to a race weekend.

And in regards to well I think if the members KNEW what was needed and how they could help you would possibly get more help and offers than if they didn't know.

Some examples off the top of my head:
Nancy's back end work load:
With a system that won't allow for incomplete or invalid forms that should reduce A LOT of her time in that department.
The need to bring all those paper forms to each and every race, gone. Yes you can get signatures w/o paper for forms.
Organizing all the printed/emailed forms on Nancy's behalf before the race day, gone. It will all be organized and structured in the system.
Someone can submit a form at 4am the day before they show up and guess what they are in the system. No need for the cut-off times before traveling to the events because it has to be printed.
Grid print out, Press a single button done

@Josh, I don't see how much project management it would take. I deal with project management and application development daily, if the PM has to spend that much time then whoever is doing the work either isnt getting full specs or the developer is ****. Here Josh I built this system for you , go check it out and let me know what you think based on the specs you gave me? If in a year you are telling me you don't have time to do that then I don't know what to say. It should take lets say a week of time here and there tops to create a specs document for a system like this and then its handed off and he can get back to the things that are keeping him busy.
Greg, I want to thank you for your offer to "try" and come up with an online registration system. FYI I also thanked the 4 other people that actually "did try" before they lost interest in racing and faded away. With that in mind forgive me if I don't start throwing rose pedals at the feet of every well meaning member that steps up with a better way to do things. Ted has spent much more of his very limited personal time working on this than you or anyone else for that matter will ever know. The result of that work is something that is light years further along than what his predecessors produced. So let me take a moment to thank Ted for what he "has done" so far. Now, I appreciate the bullet points on how the system that you should've, could've, or would've built would revolutionize the way we do registration. It actually does sound pretty easy, but it also sounds familiar. It's easy to look at a process from one perspective and be certain that there's a better way to perform that process. Lets get rid of this step and that step and boom the process is faster. The thing is all those steps have a specific purpose. This is what the 4 other people ran into. All of them in one way or another wanted us to change everything else we do to fit their ideas rather than build something that would work with what we had. Didn't make a lot of sense then or now.

I want to tell you a few things about myself. I'm a smart guy. I believe I'm a good manager and a very good problem solver. I also have a tremendous amount of experience in my field. Racing is my full time job specifically motorcycle racing but I have experience and connections in other forms of motorsports as well. I make it a point to stay on top of what is happening in my field. I try to stay on top of and understand industry standards. I also make it a point to not spout off statistics unless I know that they are correct. With these things in mind I would suggest that you not so easily discount my statement that likely only 20% of our members would use online registration. Does this mean that I don't want us to have it? Of course not, it simply means that we'll have it when we have it.

Finally, I wasn't inviting a discussion in my previous post I was simply giving our final answer.