b3ta.com board
You are not logged in. Login or Signup
Home » Messageboard » Message 9770642 (Thread)

# Let me guess
Were the people who were actually going to use the system consulted, or involved at all? Or were you just given it and told to use it?
(, Thu 29 Oct 2009, 13:17, archived)
# ha - the other side of the coin
When I worked for the big red X company, they had a ridiculous system whereby project managers entered certain bits of information into Excel, printed it off, then gave it to my team to enter into our processing tool - which I reckoned was a pretty roundabout way of doing it, so I wrote some scripts to pull the stuff out of Excel and run our tool automatically overnight/whenever.

My boss told me I ought to get the systems department to release my scripts (written in Tcl/Tk - we got lumbered with it by some legacy software someone had written years before). So I asked them.

"Oh, you shouldn't be doing that, you don't work in systems"
"No, I know, but I've written it cos the current process is bollocks. I've tested it and it's really not a very complicated process"
"Well, if there's an improvement to be made, our developers will do it"
"Right - do we have any Tcl/Tk developers?"
"No...oh wait, we have one guy in another office"
"Right, can you ask him to look at my code and check it's ok?"
"Ok"
--- 3 months later ---
"He says he's too busy to do it"

Luckily my whole team had been using it anyway, which saved us a lot of time. Moral is, if you want it done, do it yourself, cos no-one else cares.

/ranty geek blog
(, Thu 29 Oct 2009, 13:31, archived)