Provisional Progress is here!

[Spencer]

Provisional Progress

We’ve been working on it for a couple months now, and we’re excited to say that Provisional Progress has arrived! What is Provisional Progress, you ask? It’s a setting you can turn on (it’s off by default) that lets any member of your troop enter “provisional” achievement data. It’s “provisional” because a leader with the ** Edit Achievement Records Privilege (EARP)** must confirm the data for it to show up in places like the shopping cart or the user’s profile.

Hopefully this makes things easier on our awesome leaders by letting parents & youth enter their own data.

Turn it on

Go to Settings ⚙ > Edit Troop Settings and choose the “TroopTrack Settings” tab to turn on Provisional Progress.

Submitting awards (Without the EARP)

Once that’s turned on, people without the EARP will have a “Record Individual Progress” option under Achieve.

You might want to notice that users with the EARP also have a “Record Individual Progress” option under achieve. There are a couple differences to the page depending on if you have the EARP or not.

With the EARP you can edit any achievement for anyone in your Access Level. Without the EARP you can only edit incomplete achievements, and for those you can’t change completion dates.

Also, once someone enters an achievement as provisionally/conditionally complete, no one else can edit it–either a user with the EARP can approve or reject it, or the original user can change or remove it.

Frodo doesn’t have the EARP, so he can’t edit his completed ranks:

Frodo can’t change completion dates, since he doesn’t have the EARP, but he can record new completion dates:

Reviewing awards (With the EARP)

Leaders with the EARP can review pending completion data by going to Achieve > Approve Completions, or by following the link that shows up on the Dashboard.

On the approving page you can filter by who earned the award or who marked it as complete, and you can sort and search the table for more specific info. You can even view the history of approved awards!

Awards will only show up on the shopping list (and other such places) once someone with the EARP approves them.

Other stuff

We’ve also released some bugfixes:

• For BSA, we were showing raw HTML in the “Board of Review Worksheets”. That’s been fixed.
• Trying to go to the new troop form while already logged in was breaking. Not anymore.

An earlier version of this post incorrectly said you needed the Manage Awards Privilege (MAP) to approve awards. This has been corrected to the Edit Achievement Records Privilege (EARP).

[schwammrs]

Yay! This is what we’ve been eagerly anticipating. I went right in and took away the “Edit Achievement Records” privilege from all the parents! Badge requirements are much “safer” now!

HOWEVER it “broke” the Add Service Hours button and we really need all parents to have access to that button for anyone in their household! As far as I can tell, the Add Service Hours button shows up for anyone that the User has Access to if either the User has Edit Achievement Records privilege or the User has Manage Events privilege and it shows up only for the User if the User has Manage own outside participation privilege.

Obviously, I don’t want to give EAR privilege back to parents, but I also don’t want to give them all Manage Events privilege to give them back the Add Service Hours button for their girls, since that also lets them edit or delete ANY EVENT on our calendar!

If only the Manage own outside participation privilege allowed the user to manage outside participation for anyone they have access to, e.g. household, unit, self.

So, now I’m not sure what I should do… Give badge privileges back to parents, or trust them with events management. Or go back to paper logs for outside service hours. : (

[slfabric]

Give all girls an account. You can use mom’s (or dad’s…) email multiple times and mom could make every password the same is she wanted for ease. The usernames would still be different and that’s what matters. Mom would log into each account to record each girl’s service hours. Minor inconvenience to switch but it helps them know that they are only in x girl’s account and enter only her hours. Older girls who are allowed (by parent) could go online and enter their own.

[SRUEDU]

Oh this is amazing!!! I’ve been off the TT grid for several months. This came out at the same time my mom had several strokes. I’m just now seeing it. I’m doing a happy dance, I’ve texted my coordinator and advancement and they are doing happy dances!!

THANK YOU!!!

[SRUEDU]

@Spencer So I’m a little behind and I can’t seem to get this feature to work for our families. It’s very possible I’m missing something or put something in wrong. For our non-leader families and girls I’ve taken off the privilege “Edit Achievements” and replaced it for our families with the “Manage Own Outside Privileges”. But unless every girl has an account, the only thing the parent can enter is stuff for themselves, the parent. With families that have several girls, logging in and out of individual girls would be something they would get frustrated with. Is there anyway to fix it so that if a parent has household privileges, they can manage their daughters from their own account?

The other thing I’ve discovered is that unless my Pi/Pa’s have the “Edit User Achievement” privilege, even with the “Manage Own Outside Participation” they can’t enter their own achievements. When I went back in to give the girls “EUA” it now allows our girls to manage their service stars. Is that a new thing? Before, it wasn’t something that our girls could do (to our knowledge).

The feature is brilliant! But it’s going to be difficult to put into practice if my families have to have different accounts for all their girls. Some of our families have 4-5 girls. I really hope that I’m just missing something or doing something wrong and I can have this fixed.

Thanks,
Crissi

[SRUEDU]

@Spencer @KelsieC We are noticing that several of our families can’t enter service for their daughters like @schwammrs reported. The funny thing is that some of our families can. One of the members who currently cannot enter service is a board member. She has complete privileges and can’t enter service hours unless she signs in as her daughter. None of my other board members have this glitch.

Is there any chance that parents will be given household permissions so that they can enter their girls’ stuff without having to sign in to each girls’ account? Unless our girls are Pi/Pa’s they don’t have their own accounts.

Thanks,
Crissi

[KelsieC]

@SRUEDU Can you email me with the name of the mother and daughter so that I can take a look at it? Thanks in advance!

[SRUEDU]

@KelsieC We gave up on the new feature. Last night we removed all our parents & leaders privileges and then just went back and put them in the way they were with full edit achievement access. It seems to have fixed all the quirkiness we had going on. As well as the board member parent who was having the permissions troubles with the full access.

[KelsieC]

Sorry it wasn’t working for you! If you decide to try again at some point, let me know and I will take a look at it.

[SRUEDU]

Thanks @KelsieC! Will you let us know if there are any plans for the future to give household access to parents for the Managing Outside Participation? (To eliminate the need for parents to have a different account for each child).

Thanks!

[AaronStorey]

Your assumption that this is a limitation of the feature is incorrect, this seems to be more of a Bug related specifically to individual’s accounts in TT, if you send the info to @KelsieC then perhaps she can get to the bottom of why specific users have this problem when most people do not and the feature works as expected.

[SRUEDU]

We did have a bug issue I think. But once we deleted all the permissions for parents and leaders and then put them back without the Managing Outside Participation everything worked. What our troop was having problems with was that unless there was an account for each individual girl, parents couldn’t manage their daughter’s individual progress from the parent account. To enter any information, the parent had to sign into a girls’ account.

Previously, parents of our younger girls could sign in as a parent, add achievements and service for all their girls without having to sign-in and out for each daughter. Once we enabled the “Manage Outside Participation” we discovered that every girl would need to have an account and parents would have to remember accounts for each of their daughters to enter badge work and service. Some of our families have 4-5 girls and our girls who are 4/5th grade and down, entering badge work and service privileges was more than our board was comfortable with.

What we were asking was if there were plans to give Household access. So that if parents had household access, they would be able to add badge work and service participation without having to sign in and out if they have multiple girls. Currently, only our girls from 7th grade and up have the privilege to manage their own participation.

Does that make sense? Are there other troops out there that have a work around this using the Manage own Participation when they have large families or multiple kids? We’ll gladly try something else. Most of our parents aren’t tech savvy so when we change things, they tend to freak out.

I think what we thought the Manage Own Outside Participation would do is allow parents to do all the same things they did before, in the same way, except that they would no longer have the option to “recognize” their kids’ badges. It would become a feature that only our leaders and board would see since they would have “Edit Achievements” privileges. Our initial thought was that parents wouldn’t even see/realize there was much of a change at all. It was probably more a misconception/lack of understanding on our part rather than an actual TT issue. We were just wondering if there was any plans/or way to make it function as we described. If so, it would be a beautiful feature for our troop and would cut down on some of the headaches we have when parents tend to recognize their daughter’s badges before the girl presents it.

[AaronStorey]

You are actually talking about two different things, the “Manage own outside participation” privilege is different from allowing Parents to enter Provisional Progress for their children. Do you want Parents to be able to add Participation in outside events to their daughters Participation profile or just enter earned Achievements that would then be approved by a leader?

I re-read through the other comments by @schwammrs and yourself, so I now understand that you need Parents to have the ability to both enter Advancements as well as Service Hours. By enabling this Provisional Progress feature and removing the “Edit Achievements” privilege you have effectively broken a Parents ability to enter Service Hours for their Daughter. The idea of allowing “Manage own outside participation” to be Household based is an Idea Request, this also feeds into the idea of more granular controls on privileges which has been asked about previously. Unfortunately at this point it looks like the only way to get both of the items you want is to go back to how you had it where Parents have the “Edit Achievements” privilege and then trust that they completed everything with no specific approval from a leader.

[SRUEDU]

Drat!! I was hoping you would catch something that I missed. Our girls do an enormous amount of service so it’s imperative that parents be able to enter it. I’m not sure how we’d track it on paper and the actual needing to store those records from year to year for each girl… Last year we actually added up all the service hours for our girls. We had 5,000 service hours spread over 92 girls. I shudder to think what our leaders would do/say if we had them enter all those hours.

We’ve also got quite a few go-getters when it comes to badges. If parents can enter their daughter’s badge requirements, then leaders can just look in TT and see what requirements a girl did, ask them questions about it when the girl presents. We have our parents fill in the “notes” section on each requirement for how the girl achieved the requirement. For us, we just have to make our parents responsible for entering their daughter’s stuff. Our leaders are our stop gap to make sure everyone stays honest and on track.

[TanyaPlott]

This is regarding the Provisional Progress posts. I went to manage and settings on the Beta Test screen and I do not have a settings option. Does the Troop Coordinator need to give that access to a parent?

[dave]

Hi @TanyaPlott - if you had the “Settings” option in the old TroopTrack, you still have it in TT4, but we moved it. There is now a “gear” icon in the top row. If you see that, you should be able to access settings.

[TanyaPlott]

Dave,

I checked the old Troop Track and do not have the “Settings” option. Is this an option only given to Board Members or Troop Coordinators? Who should I contact internal to my Troop to have them change this setting so parents can enter Provisional Progress for their girls.

Also, would they also be the ones assigning me and giving me access as the new Advancement Chair?

Thanks again.

[dave]

The settings option is available via a privilege that anyone can have, usually troops have someone who is the “TroopTrack Admin”. We don’t like to share users names on the forums, so I’ll email you separately with the name of your account owner.

[TanyaPlott]

Dave,

Thanks so much. I will look forward to your email.

[mwestcott1]

Hi @Spencer,
I am just seeing this - 1.5 years late to the game!

Can you confirm this for me:

1. If I turn on Provisional Progress, it will give every TroopTrack user the ability to use Achieve > Record Individual Progress.
2. When parents log in and click on Achieve > Record Individual Progress, they will see all of the registered youths in their household listed.
3. If parents have Access Level of Unit, in addition to the registered youths in their own household, they will see all the registered youths in their units listed
4. If the parents have Access Level of Troop, in addition to the registered youths in their own household, they will see all the registered youths in the troop listed.
5. If a registered youth member logs in to her own account and clicks on Achieve > Record Individual Progress, she will see only her name listed.

I’ve been messing around with this tonight, and this is what I think I am observing, but since I only have 1 daughter in the troop, I can’t test all of this out for families with multiple girls.

I just want to make sure I understand what the other families will be seeing.

Thanks so much! I am really excited to see if this works for our troop!!