I am finding a need to justify to our HR department the need for a full time Tessitura Specialist/Administrator/Manager position. I have completed a job description and a justification for the position here but HR has informed me that they believe such a position is not a long term fulltime position. I would like to give them a number for the number of Tessitura users that have such a position. We are a museum and we went live only 9 months ago. Our project manager for the implementation was/is our collections management system administrator and two systems is one too many for one person to oversee.
Any help you can provide me to justify that administering Tessitura is a long term full time position will be greatly appreaciated.
Our Tessitura implementation project manager was hired on full time and eventually became our IT director...
I more or less fulfill that role here at Cal Performances, and have for the last, huh, decade.
What other technical staff do you have interacting with Tessitura? Do you have your installation in-house? Do you run your own Tessitura-driven website? Do you have a DBA who works with the Tessitura database?
The Science Museum of Minnesota has two full time database developers/Administrators, a web designer, and a almost full time Tessitura Application Specialist for projects, performance guidance and training. Training alone is full time if you have enough turn-around. We are self-hosted and heavily customized.
Hi Carol - I'm that person here at the Stratford Festival. We have a number of people fulfilling Tessitura roles. Myself as the Administrator, a Reporting Coordinator, Analytics Coordinator, Senior Developer, Programmer. We are all full time.
I am the db admin at the Saint Louis Symphony, work almost exclusively on Tessitura, and do it 50 hours a week easy.
We have a team of two full-time employees - a Database & Systems Administrator and myself, Database & Systems Manager. We are on RAMP and are mostly out of the box in terms of customizations (which hopefully will be changing soon!). Our Systems Admin handles the day-to-day system management (season setup, data entry, promo setup, etc) as well as user training and I handle a lot of the project management, scheduling, the limited customizations that we do have, and data analysis.
And we self-host.
Brooklyn Academy of Music I'm DBA./Tessitura admin.
I work at a large-ish museum, and while we have a network admin/dba, other IT staff, a Marketing/Online team, but I am the primary Tessitura resource and Tessitura 'owner' if you will. I'm supposed to admin other applications as well, but I find that I don't have enough resources to do everything I want with Tessitura right now, let alone configure and manage other major apps.
We at the PortTIX box office are we are currently in the process of fully developing our System Admin position. We transitioned to tessitura in 2017 and I wish we'd started off with the position then. Part of the reason we are developing this position is that Marketing and Development folks simply can't take advantage of all the reports, list pulls, etc. - they spend a great deal of time learning how to use tessiutra rather than just using it. We need somone who can not only do the work but also truly understand features so they can teach other staff. Tessitura education videos, etc are great but they can't do the job all by themselves - not with a system so complex that can be configured differently for different organizations. This is not just growing pains about learning a new system - even if we were to somehow catch up with all of the features, tessitura is always adding new features and new upgrades. I hope you have other staff who see the value in this position - or at least recognize where the gaps are even if they can't articulate the solution. Hopefully you can enlist them.
I'd love to be able to see your job description if you are comfortable passing it on - if you want you can email it to rmccomish at porttix.com - I'm happy to send you the documentation we create when submitting position propsal to the board this summer.
Best of luck!
I'm the Tessitura Specialist for us and we are RAMP/TNEW. I was brought on primarily to launch ticketing and TNEW. Since then I've been the go to person for Reporting, Finance Integration, Development and Education Integration, CRM and Wordfly etc 50+ hours a week. I made a case for me to get BoxOffice and Ticketing backup just to get the load down. There is a real need for a Tessitura Administrator; it's one of those "if you build it they will come things" - the minor customisations, upgrades and training tasks are easily enough for a full time position. Even with my supporting team I still am flat out.
We only have one official Tessitura Administrator (me), but we also have a Development Research Manager who acts as the Development's first line of defense for similar requests. But as others have said below, any level of minor customizations, new report requests, website issues and questions, not to mention weird one-time data requests. Then there is application user access and management, not to mention someone whose job it is to look out for data integrity and be the go to person to train and tell people "this is how you do this" or "you cannot do that without also affecting all of this" is highly useful. If the position is there, it WILL get used.
"weird one-time data requests" - this. And the ability to judge when you need to custom report it. And the ability to custom report it.
If I can also stress that centralising the role will bring your data integrity together. I've spent a lot of time tidying a number of disparate Constituencies, Attributes (GL codes even). Without a Tessitura Admin it can become a wild west in there