Hello!
We are currently working on tidying up our Production Elements in Ticketing Setup as it is all a bit of a mess. Lots of historic titles and prod seasons from old productions that have been imported into Tessitura and are now clogging it up. As such we want to clean the whole thing up and format everything in a much more formally structured system that I have been using as standard for the past few years.
However, we have encountered a bit of a snag with updating the orders associated with these older performances. We want to move performances into a tidier new hierarchy which will mean updating the old performance/prod season IDs everywhere, including all the associated orders. To do this, we are thinking of utilizing the Import/Export Order utility, but are looking for some advice before hand. Has anyone every gone through a large restructure like this before and if so what would you recommend? Is there anything we should be sure to avoid?
Thanks in advance!
Alex
Alex Scotchbrook,
Firstly, we have done this. It is NOT the most fun task ever, so I wish you well there. Secondly, though, if it is necessary and done right, it can be a HIGHLY effective way to simplify both your future product/performance creation as well reporting/analytics. So you can be excited about that. I assume you have someone on staff who can do database work, because that is going to be your biggest aid on this project. It is the quickest and easiest way to clean things up, especially if you can put things into some kind of programmable paradigm. If not... well, I would be a little afraid to do it without someone who knows what they are doing in the database, just being honest (though I suppose that might be coming a result of my own level of comfort there; anyway).
Secondly, probably obvious, but make sure you have a fully designed structure in mind. These thing goes here, these other things go there, etc... from the main stays of your calendar down to the nitty gritty and things that only come around once every year or even rarer still. If you want to update performance codes, too, this is your moment to do so. It is not the most fun to do that, but if you are going to both to do so, you might as well do it now. Performance types, season types and structure, etc... If you are going to do this, do it right. Make it your wonderful world.
Thirdly, and of course, to document the heck out of everything. You do not want to go through this again if you can avoid it, and people are going to be building new things before you know it, and they will immediately forget the changes you have made. So be ready to be able to say "this is how it works". This is how you tell what fiscal year it was from, this is how you tell which organization, this is a rental, this is education, this is performance, this is donor, this is city government, etc... Whatever nonsense you have that someone is going to want to know how/what it is and how to tell things apart, now is the time. Performance codes have few to no references in standard reporting (though I of course cannot speak to any custom reporting you have in place), so there should be no worry about changes there.
Lastly, there are a number of things to consider when moving things around. Ticket history and ticket overview will need to be rebuilt. You may need to consider pre-existing lists and scheduled reports that are already built. Also, the audit trail of each particular performance. You may think that it does not matter since you are completely uprooting and replanting everything, but it is always good practice to be able to figure out whence things originated. Fees, batch ticket printers, RollOver and Seat Cancellation sets, these are all things that can be affected.
Luckily for you (and unuckily for us), as I said, we have had to do this before, and every so often someone build something in the wrong place or someone up top decides that something that absolutely and unquestionable was a Development event now actually was an Education event and we have to move/re-order it back into its (new) place in the structure. What that means is that I basically have a step by step procedure that I have created for moving around events within the database that I have used as recently as last month. Send me an e-mail, and I can send you the zip file with the instructions and related SQL files, jmoskal@thecenterpresents.org.
Best of luck!
John A. Moskal II
I seem to have two "secondly"s. Oops. Oh well.