Some people never learn...
At the company i work at we have many field engineers. So about 2 years ago some bright spark realised that we had no way of monitoring or properly controlling the work they did so it was time to get a proper system in. Despite the fact that the one we had was fine. Edit: Bright spark worked 200 miles away in another office.

Many meetings were had and people in suits wandered the offices looking at call centres and stats and job sheets. Then one day myself and one of my workmates were asked to have a chat to some bloke in a suit with a badly receding hairline and a ponytail of all things. Head developer i think his title was.

He asked how we worked and what we wanted from a new system so with no prior preperation (no one told us about this meeting), we throw up the basics. "we can do all that no trouble" he says.

So, the new system starts up where by engineers now have a PDA and jobs get sent out to them and they submit the jobs back for invoicing via PDA all in real time. Oh, someone in HR also made sure the system incorporated a GPS tracker system in the vans so they could see where they were in real time.

The system was shit. It was slow, badly put together and everyday would throw users out of it and bring up database errors and all kinds of crap. The PDAs were slow taking HOURS to sync up. The engineers hated it and refused to use them creating a massive backlog of jobs to be invoiced.

I suggested in an e-mail that the system was crap and was promptly given a verbal warning about misuse of e-mail (I did suggest that Terminal 5 used the system untill the found a much better one for the opening day!)

So, after all the hassle eventualy we worked with it to a limited fashion and we get told that the company that provided the system was getting taken over by a very large comms company. This happend quickly and we were then told that as our systme was unique to our company that it would no longer be supported and they had gotten rid of the old support team so basically "fuck off".

So, in light of the massive problem of having no system support, some bright spark decided to see about using a new company to design us a new system! Hooray we thought. Then we get told this new company consisted of all the previous people from the old company that had been disposed of in the takeover but with a new name. Alarm bells start ringing for me and my workmates.

So, new system ready to test and we get our first look at it and get asked what we think and come up with over 100 issues with it. "Oh, we can get them fixed before we go live next month" we are told.

So we launched this new system last week and its not doing as it is supposed to, the new PDAs dont work and the engineers hate them, the jobs are piling up, and to top it off we were shown how to use it by the same pony-tailed knob we met before except now he is the "CEO" of the new company.

So my company paid twice (a lot by all accounts) for the same basic system that does not work and they are still to tight to give us a pay rise this year.

But hey, as long as it can be used to generate those fantastic reports to make sure no engineer claims an extra half hour on his timesheet then its worth every penny. (They like a good witch hunt)

The moral of the story? Managers know fuck all about software and can be bamboozled into buying anything, no matter how shit, that can produce a graph.

Apologies for the length.
(Beaverman Opulence, I has it., Fri 11 Jun 2010, 18:53, Reply)