I’ve concluded that the technical development and support areas for my place of employment are all crack junkies. We have a program that is supposed to be innovative technology to track our incoming calls and inventory. When it was originally introduced, we were told that we would have real time reports, easy to use and train interfacing, simple tracking functions and an increase of productivity. Someone seriously misrepresented the functionality of this program.
The first noticeable
fib misstatement was that it was easy to use and train. During the initial training phase, all of our employees that where going through training, including myself, noted that there was a lot more steps to using this new program. Eight more steps to be precise. There was more data to enter manually and more fields in which data could be entered. This meant we had to learn and memorize more codes and code placements. Even with cheat sheets, it was annoying. It was also due to these extra steps that it would take longer to train newer employees on the use of this system as compared to the old system.
The second noticeable
lie misstatement was the increase in productivity. We where advised there would be a 6-8 week learning curve. After 2 months, we noticed our people where not getting up to the old production standards, let alone an increase of productivity. After a total of 4 months they where running at about 50-75% productivity depending on the individual. Well it’s been almost 2 years and we’ve maxed out at 60-80% productivity as compared to what we had before. It’s my job to track these things and I’m kind of obsessive/compulsive about my figures, so I have all the data and figures going back to the time I started this job. Matching the numbers, I can see how much productivity was lost. Therefore, whenever someone here calls me on my data, I have in all seriousness almost 105,000 pages of data that I can give them to support my facts. About a year ago I had a director of operations question my numbers in a meeting. I excused myself, went to storage, got my boxes of data and brought it in for him to look at. It was rather amusing to see the look on his face as I brought in box after box after box of data. Since that time, no one questions the numbers for the drop in productivity.
The next
fabrication informative flaw was the simple tracking functions. Was that ever a misrepresentation of the facts! They system had built in reports, however in order to get the reports to work you had to create your own queries to run first. If the query did not match exactly the way the report was programmed for it to match, it would throw out false data. No one gave us the query formats, so as I would try to get data for my office, I was routinely crashing the system. The query I would come up with would bring back raw data, then when I ran the report, it would look for information that wasn’t included in the query and start to build false data to fill the void. While doing that it would drain the server resources and people would start to complain their systems where timing out. Even after they gave us the correct query formats, I discovered that you couldn’t check on more then 10 individuals at a time. When you have to obtain information for about 150 people, at 5-10 minutes a query/report, you can spend most of a day doing nothing but running queries and reports. I was actually offered a position with the IT unit for testing because I could crash the system easily and they had no one that could duplicate what I was doing. I explained to them all I was doing was trying to run reports that would return the information we need in the field offices. What they would test is just to see if the reports work. There is a huge difference running a test report on five users with only 100 records as opposed to 150 users with in excess of a billion records and about 500,000 new records a day. It seems IT people can’t think outside of their little domain and see the real world.
Finally, we get to real time reports. This has been a great feature of this program. I can forgive everything else just for this function. Prior to this program, we only had historical reports. We could look at where our inventory was as of Midnight the night before. With this new program, I could run the reports whenever I wanted to get up to the second information. This was the best tool I had to do my job. Then it happened, they started restricting when we could run reports. It seems the running of reports itself was causing the servers to slow down, so unless you only wanted to check on one to two users, you had to run the reports early in the morning. Apparently, all the users where taxing on the servers and the reports were the coup de gras. Fine, I started coming in early to run these reports and the old system was not compatible with the new one so I had to use these reports. Then about 7 months ago, they announced they are going to do away with the reports. No matter when they are run, they are draining the resources and causing system problems. I was infuriated. These reports are what I needed to do my job. They advised they are going to a historical system so we can get the data. A system that is more difficult to use then the previous system. I’m on the testing team for it, so I have first hand knowledge of it.
So now, I bet you are wondering why are we still using this new program? Well it is because this was one of the Executive VPs pet projects and the company has already spent in excess of a billion dollars on it. They are not going to scrap it and say they made a mistake now. They are going to keep tinkering with it until it functions well.
They tinkered with it over the weekend, and installed an update. Well that update killed the system and the IT team didn’t realize it. They had only tested it on one region and it had worked. When I came in this morning, we couldn’t access the system at all. It was completely down and it remained down for almost 2 hours until they could back out the upgrade.
I’m really starting to hate IT people.
(At my place of employment. Updated at 1:35 PM CDT 05/02/05. That's just for you, VW.)
<< Home