There’s a different model? Huh.
Most recent roll-out at my company dropped the ball on step 2. One set of legacy data did not transfer correctly. They solved the problem and transferred every pretty quickly, but still.
My mother calls SAP projects “pregnancies” because well-managed ones last 9 months (plus 2 or 4 weeks of hypercare). The steps’ names vary depending on company and on which philosophy is officially used, but they boil down to:
- take requirements (if rollout, from Core and from the locations; if central design, from selected interlocutors; if single-location, from everybody since “everybody” isn’t that big)
- write desired processes and list of gaps
- come up with ways to fill gaps (may involve programming, using specific pre-defined system settings or training the users out of the requirement*)
- meanwhile (the timing varies by module/department) get extracts of the old data and start cleaning it, preparing the load programs (if rollout they will normally be already available) and testing loads
- test the processes using the loaded data (some people do this in ways designed to minimize the amount of gaps and errors found; others do it in “try to kill the system” mode)
- train those users who weren’t part of the testing
- load the final system with the cleaned-up data
- ok people, we’re live
If your gap-hunting was agressive enough, hypercare can be a cakewalk. I’ve had projects (single-location, rollouts and core) where people were actually happy with the system’s performance and their own after a week; one particular years-long project where I was involved in most rollouts where several rollouts were happy in the first week (the old systems had really needed replacing and we’d been murderous in our testing: bug! kill it now!). If your gap-hunting is designed to maximize the amount of billing from maintenance and fixes then no, most users won’t be happy: the objectives do not include making them happy, just keeping the bosses happy enough that they keep paying.
- No, Mr. Production Manager, you don’t need a special screen so you can have the name of the material appear to the left of the material’s code when everybody else wants code then name. What you need is to learn how to set up your own report layouts. Here, let me teach you and have this nice manual.
That ability to tell one person (or a small group of people) “No” because they’re asking for something special just for themselves or different from what works for the other 95% of users is something I’ve seen any number of IT managers struggle with.
“We have to make EVERYONE happy!”
The fuck we do. Back in the 80’s, one person on our user design team wanted me to change my insurance ratings programs that ran on his PC to make a distinctly different sound for each key, so he could type by sound. I said no. My boss threw a fit. I told her what it would require while also asking the other users what they thought of this. They were adamantly against the idea as they didn’t want the computer making a bunch of different beeping noises while they typed. I damned near got a disciplinary warning for telling the guy no in front of my boss, then we didn’t do it because everyone else said no, not because it was a stupid idea that would require too much work to satisfy one person. 
Some managers are smarter about this, but there’s always those who demand pie in the sky while not thinking rationally about costs and need, as well as the egotists like my second to the last boss, who was such an arrogant micromanaging fuckwad that he’d get mad at us for making the smallest decisions. Because ONLY HE could make decisions. :rolleyes:
My first SAP project worked according to a series of rules which back then thought perfectly logical and experience has shown me were exceedingly logical and exceedingly rare. I’ve applied them to my own designs whenever I could. One of them was “if it truly is different, that should be evident in the system; if it’s equivalent outside, it should look the same inside”.
It’s as absurd to spend time and money making a transaction that a single person will ever use (1), as to force everybody into a single Process which often is too small for the big places and too large for the small ones.
1: the all-time cake winner was an exact copy of a standard screen. No changes to code. A minor change to the initial layout (it takes about five minutes to do that when it’s a user doing it for the first time with me explaining it over his shoulder). The consulting firm had billed a month’s work. Yee-haw!
I once had a micromanaging bitch for a boss who not only had to control every decision, she had to police employees consulting one another. When I was a new employee, she reprimanded the other employee for answering my work-related questions, because she HAD to know what questions I was asking and make sure I got the right answer. Some of these questions were as earth-shattering as “Where do we store files for X?” I wasn’t allowed to talk to my coworker about anything work related even though we were doing the same job. Instead I had to wait until her highness was available to answer my piddling questions.
She wouldn’t allow us to do common sense things like store files alphabetically even though it added 30 minutes to our day digging out client files. She never touched the files herself, she just insisted the files be stored chronologically, regardless of how it impacted those of us who actually used them.
I fucking hated that woman. I still hate her.
93.7% of complaints about IT systems (and departments) could be resolved by that answer.
I’ve hit a wall where my own anxiety and perfectionism are combining with the incompetence and/or laziness of others to create a superstorm of Not Giving A Fuck But Feeling Really Anxious About It.
I’ve seen it so much at this fucking company that I’m wondering whether the problem is me.
For the fifthfuckingtime in six months, my team burned a week chasing down a bug that’s the result of a developer doing an integer compare against two dotted decimal numbers.
Quick, which is the later date? February the first or January the tenth?
Well if you were these idiots, you’d take 2/1 and 1/10, strip out the slashes, and write them down as 21 and 110.
21 < 110, so obviously January the 10th is the later date, right?
Fucking thing is, this is the third dumbass on the same team who’s made the same shortcut of staggering genius in the last six months. And it’s passed QA every time.
And I’ll open a bug, and they’ll fuck it up in some other way, and their boss and grandboss will let it slide because they have no incentive to keep an eye on quality when they rewarded for shoveling piles of shit out the door on time and on budget.
Fuck I hate this job.
Those guys must be the same ones who programmed the phone tree system for Colorado’s health-care exchange. I tried to use it once. For routine questions you have to key in your birth date numerically, two digits for the month, two for the day, then four for the year. My birth date is in November, so the string starts with 11. The recording responds with “Your birth date is January first.” I have no other way to prove my identity, so I have to start the call over and pick the number for technical assistance so I can get a human. I can not possibly be the first person this has happened to; I wonder if it is ever going to be fixed.
At least the human was able to verify that the system had indeed screwed my account up and fix it, so I guess the technical help number was the right one to press anyway.
I once had a boss who was was a micromanager and paranoid. Everyone whose done any programming knows that for any given goal there is rarely only one correct solution and usually five or six. Nope. Every module had to be designed the way she would have done it. Go back and fix it.
The paranoid part. The company server was mis-configured so that it wouldn’t boot properly without manual intervention. Looking back, I probably should have given some thought as to why it was that way because the boss was technically quite capable of doing it right. But at the time my ethic was see a problem, fix a problem. Got written up for that one. That was another job I didn’t stay with long. And another that didn’t last long after I left. I had nothing to do with it closing, the boss just had a way of pissing off nearly every client she worked for.
Speaking of fabulous connections…
the VPN my current client uses indicates “Connection ended” instead of “Connection established” or some such. Freaks me out every time. Can I kill the translator and use his guts to hang whomever decided an actual translator wasn’t needed?
There are now two (!) Project Manager positions open at my company. Woo! Unfortunately, the supervisor for these positions is a raging asshat. As much as I would like the change, I can’t bring myself to report to this guy. >.<
And an additional 3% increase in problems caused by a curious user reading the manual saying “wow, I didn’t know I could do that!”.
Most of my IT problems come from my friend Joe.
An actual quote from Joe. “I watch a lot of porn so I get a lot of viruses.”
Our IT department decided to just block his email address.
Problem solved.
Well, yeah …
Hold my Latte and watch this!!
Oh joy, today’s shaping up to be a good one. I was responsible for moving the bulk of the company’s IT equipment. And just about everything made it. Except one stupid USB stick worth thousands of dollars. FML. And here I thought I at least did okay after working myself quite literally sick. Nope, lost one tiny little crappy electronic dongle that’s worth more than I currently own. And it’s not even my damn fault, it changed hands numerous times between my packing it and it being awol. Argh I hate everything about this.
I’ve been searching for a new job without notable success since August. As of this afternoon, I now have two interviews, one tomorrow and one the next day.
Man, I know businesses are all happy with the new budgets and stuff, and I hope they’re willing to splurge, but it might have been nicer if it had happened a couple months back, you know? *Before *I ran through much of my savings?
ETA: It would also be nice if these were permanent jobs and not contract positions. The benefits are better that way.
Are you saying that nothing on that USB drive was backed up? That’s the company’s idiotic move, not yours.
If it was backed up, they can make a new “USB stick”.
Now, if by “worth thousands of dollars” they mean “OMG, we’ll be at the mercy of a blackmailer (who’s already wealthy, doesn’t need much, just a few thousand…) because the videos of the CEO square-dancing naked with goats are on that drive!”, well…
I don’t mean to speak for anyone else, but in my line of work, several very expensive bits of proprietary software will only operate when the control USB drive is inserted, and that drive cannot be duplicated (I mean, I’m sure it can, but not by ordinary means). This means that the software can be loaded on multiple convenient computers, but only the paid-for number of users can be operating it at any given time.
However, that control USB should have been firmly secured to something larger.
Our programmer has declared that it is not possible to copy a report and modify the copy. Dafuck, isn’t that the first thing SAP programmers are supposed to learn?
No sir, if we want a copy of a report that’s got over 100 fields, with additional fields, I must prepare the exact list, sources, crossings… because he apparently doesn’t know how to copy a program into another one.
Idiot Boss tells me “don’t prepare the whole list, just those fields which are important”. Uh, Boss, from my point of view the additional fields are the first ones that aren’t needed. And every time I’ve asked this programmer for a brand new report, giving an exact list of fields, he’s joined the tables involved completely instead of selecting the specific fields I’d specifically asked for.
I am soooo happy to be leaving.