Sounds like you need to get a copy of Crystal Reports. Report writing made easy enough for people like me to use.
Wait, you’re leaving, so it doesn’t matter. 
Actually, what would be nice is if more companies bothered using BI*. They pay for it, but they don’t bother pay for someone to set it up.
90% of the requests for “a new report” are solved by knowing how to change layouts. It’s amazing how many people want “a new report” for something such as swapping the order of two fields. And 99.999% of the cases where an actual new report is needed are standard… in BI. And it uses Excel as its GUI, so you can even make your own pretty graphics!
- SAP’s cousin of Crystal Reports. You need someone to activate which pre-defined “cubes” you’re going to use and create the initial pre-selected reports, but then people can play with these and do a lot of nifty stuff quite easily.
Cubes: chunks of data. For example, if you’re not managing your Quality information inside SAP you don’t need to activate the Quality cubes.
It’s a rant and it’s about my workplace so here goes. I have a new cubicle neighbor and he’s generally a nice guy. He’s VERY quiet, which is unsettling but I’ve always been one of those quiet people to whom people would say “Smile!” or some such crap. So I’m alternating between being sympathetic/non-judgmental and also starting to understand what made those people so uncomfortable. I appreciate his desire for privacy, but it was five months before I found out he has a son.
Anyway, the one way in which he is not quiet is this fucking whistling he does every once in a while. It’s random. It happens whether I have music on or not (I play it very quietly on my computer to try and distract me from the whistling) and it’s not in tune or coincidental with the music that is on. It’s just a random several-note outburst from time to time.
I’m spending a lot of time trying not to sigh passive-aggressively! And plotting his quiet death. :(:(:(
:mad::mad::mad::mad:
My supervisor stuck me with a two-month backlog while many of my colleagues are on vacation then her supervisor wonders what’s taking so long for me to do my job.
With any luck, I’ll be in another department next month.
I am a project engineer. Part of my job is to buy things. I have been trying to buy some valves since before Christmas. In fact, I want to buy a lot of valves. 63 valves. I have successfully ordered and issued POs for the fittings necessary to install my 63 valves but the line item for the valves just will NOT become a PO.
At this point, you may be wondering what this has to do with my workplace. It sounds like technical issue. Well its only a technical issue because we do capital purchases in a really convoluted and stupid way. First, I put in a line item on a work order that is linked to an internal account number for my capital project. That line item is added to the requisition that is tied to that work order and awaits approval. Once approvals are complete, it is released to a batch process which interfaces with a completely different system and creates another requisition there. That requisition is then turned into a PO which replicates back to the original system and then that PO is (sometimes) automatically emailed to the vendor.
It’s really dumb. I have no visibility of what’s going wrong and no one seems to know how this is actually supposed to work. All I want to do is buy some valves so I won’t have 63 sets of fittings sitting in the maintenance shop for longer than they have to.
Oh, did I mention that these valves have a 16 week lead time?
Ugh, we had one program like that, with two keys. However, each installation would only work with a single key. Heaven forbid two people that needed the software were locked on the same key - now we’re just tossing the flash drive back and forth while cussing out developers.
I can’t even read that description; my eyes just skitter across words because they aren’t making sense, like a dog that can’t look in a mirror.
But I bet I know what happened - something got assigned to someone who doesn’t know how to do something , and s/he is ignoring it in the hope it will go away. This is happening because the company is relying on institutional knowledge instead of adequate procedures.
The real problem in not that the process is convoluted, but ignoring it might work.
Sounds like someone intentionally built the system to be so complex that only they would be trusted with running it.
I actually encountered a software program like that once. The programmer was fired and the whole thing dropped in my lap to clean up. Within a day or so at most, I’d pulled out all the “check this file, if a Y there, abort” bullshit and gotten it down to a single command to run it and a quarter page of results.
I’ve managed to train my immediate idiot into sending me his orders in writing: he’s horrible at tracking stuff. Now he sends me a To Do list once a week; it never contains priorities or due dates. I write to him every afternoon an email called “work done today”.
This week’s list included 18 points. As of yesterday I was done with 17 of them. His response to yesterday’s WDT email (listing two items from Monday’s list plus an unexpected one I got and solved yesterday) was “only this?” The unexpected piece took me two hours; it would have taken most consultants between half a day and all day. The other two items include information nobody in the team would have known other than me. At one point I’d asked a question about one of these to the other expert in that field, just to see what his answer was: yup, he gave me a runaround with lots of big words which boiled down to not having the foggiest (he knows how to razzle the clients; that doesn’t mean he knows how to dazzle me).
If I had any doubts about leaving this project he’d be removing them 
Oh, and him, his boss and the CIO tend to refer to subcontractors as [their company] employees. Combine that with having to ask them to approve vacation and with multiple emails telling us what to do, when, with whom and how, and any lawyer who didn’t sleep through Contract Law and Labor Law would be salivating. I don’t know what do they teach when someone gets a Degree in IT Management (what my immediate idiot has) but apparently the concept of “subcontractor” wasn’t part of it.
In WHAT universe is it considered appropriate or professional for managers and supervisors in a CALL CENTER to be yelling at subordinates ALL DAMN DAY? If the two of them weren’t screeching at people about break/lunch schedules (which DO appear WITH reminders on a schedule app we’re REQUIRED to have up and be logged into), they were screaming and yelling about “wrap up that call” or “get out of not-ready”. Yeah, I get that our service levels are not wonderful lately, due in part to long calls (which is much more frequently either the nature of the task being performed or the caller being an inconsiderate jackass about time) and the overgrown children who make up a lot of the staff abusing “not-ready” (if the hiring standards were higher than “has a pulse” and the pay were above minimum wage, it would help!). Still, stressing out the grownups who ARE doing their work with over eight hours of tag-team screaming nagging and making it harder for them to HEAR their calls, let alone think straight enough to DO the work does NOT help.
I desperately need to find another job. Commuting two hours each way for crap pay and working conditions that make night shift in a 7-11 or a volunteer food pantry gig look professional just is NOT worth it to me any more.
One of the managers where I work manages through yelling. It’s taken him a few years, but he’s finally figured out that yelling at me (I don’t even report to him!) doesn’t make me work faster. Most of his subordinates are terrified of him; the ones that aren’t have adopted his pushy, loud, generally obnoxious mannerisms. He and a couple of his subordinates are also “wannabe engineers,” but that’s a subject for another rant… and honestly, the time one customer service rep tried to explain some anchor bolt load calculations he found online to a room full of mechanical engineers was funny as hell.
You know, that’s one thing I just can’t understand about corporations.
1> If a manager is a micromanager, fire their ass. You hire people to do their jobs. If their manager doesn’t trust them, then either s/he is hiring the wrong people or the manager isn’t doing their own job. If someone like that worked for me, I’d be walking them down the old Documentation Trail.
(My own question as their boss would be; “Am I not giving you enough work so that you feel like you have to look for more, or are you simply unable to trust your people to do their jobs effectively?” If the latter, “Ok, I see this as your problem, not theirs, and I’m going to need you to change that right now. If you don’t trust anyone to do their jobs, then you should not be a manager.”
2> Management by abuse. I don’t care if the guy is your golf buddy or Gets Things Done. Fire the asshole, they’re costing you money and killing morale. If someone has an abusive asshole working for them and refuses to fire them, their boss should fire them both.
Chimera, can I come work for you?
I have a story that will make you grind your teeth: many years ago when I was doing tech support and programming for a county government organization, I would occasionally get calls from other county agencies that we worked with asking me to do some task. No problem, it was part of the job. One day I got such a call from an agency director. He told me what he needed, and then told me straight out that his staff were morons and he couldn’t trust them to do the task correctly, so that’s why he was calling me. Nice guy. (not)
If only it were that easy. But it isn’t.
The whole thing just stupid. My site’s superuser helped me get a work around but we still have no idea why it broke this time. Because of how our IT ticket systems work, I am no longer getting updates so I don’t know if they are fixing it or not. And I have to be ready to make sure that the problem doesn’t get fixed and then it issues all the POs that I was trying to make issue before. (The systems have a bad habit of just duplicating POs any time anything goes wrong.)
Well, if there’s someone on this board in IT management in Minnesota and wants to hire me as a manager, drop me a PM. 
I have a mini-rant to add:
So we’ve jumped with both feet into Agile development. Which means that the business analysts like me are also using Agile, instead of being off in our own little la-la land which was the previous way of doing things. (Read that as me being in favor of this new approach - there’s a LOT less conflict when the devs and analysts are in sync!)
However, for some reason they chose a gabby person to be the scrum manager. So that’s a bit of a bother. My real rant is that she’s instituted a “birthday club” and chose to do the first team birthday party… in this morning’s 15-minute scrum standup.
And this might be just my personal preference, but I’m not into eating birthday cake at 9am. :smack:
Tangentially, am I the only person who grates against the coworker-organized happy-fun-time social glee club stuff? I like my coworkers and I like for everyone to get along. I don’t see why we have to be besties, though. Let’s just be happy by making each other’s jobs easy and straightforward.
I got burpy just from reading that. :eek:<— burpy smiley
I’m in the US for some work which IMnotsoHO should have been done in November or December. There’s for example a lot of requests for “new reports” which, when I finally get the information on what exactly people need, turn out to be reports they already have but nobody has trained them. So, I’m finding out what the exact needs are and doing a lot of training.
The CIO is also here; he mentioned “we need to prepare your next travel” and I wrote to him reminding him that my contract ends February 28. I’m no fucking way renewing, already got my next contract. He gives me a grin and says “oh, you’re mistaken, it’s to end of March”. I showed him my contract: February 28. Here, on the screen. PDF. February 28th.
Next go-live date is March 1st. I’m the person who loads 70% of the master data. I’m also the person who knows most about how to make load programs, run mass fixes… and some genius put the end of my contract right before go-live. As my mother likes to say “them who think they’re too smart, are stupid”.
The very thing I’ve been thinking today!
The group of young people working near me have some type of in-joke involving the song “Loving You” by Minnie Riperton. Yes, the song with THAT HIGH NOTE. And they have sung it many times today, though not nearly as well as Minnie. Every once in a while I think things have quieted down and then one of them starts, La la la la la… My ears are bleeding.
No, this is something I always disliked, and I am very much of your mind about it. Now that I am retired, it is of course no longer an issue. Except that the same frame of mind seems to apply to many volunteer organizations as well, so that if I am not thrilled to see my co-volunteers in a social setting that makes me weird.
OK, I own it, I am weird.
I hate county attorneys. Take the same case to 6 attorneys, get 6 different answers.
Took a case to a thorough but easy going attorney this morning to get approval on a court action. She declined as the automated license suspension hadn’t run. Doesn’t matter, license was revoked years ago. She suddenly decided it DOES matter and declined my court action.
If a person doesn’t have a license, whether we suspend it does not matter. You can’t suspend something that has already been suspended or revoked.
This changes 10 years of how we’ve been handling this court action. On her whim.
Then, I had the joy of teaching a bunch of coworkers how to file this particular court action. All but two are experienced workers. I expected dumb questions from the newbies, but not from people who have been here years. Since the training ended 4.5 hours ago, I’ve received two dozen emails from attendees asking follow up questions - almost all things covered in the training.
On the positive side - a cheat sheet I drew up on the court action is now becoming mandatory manual material, which is kind of sweet. And the relevant supervisor, after being apprised of the county attorney decision, is spitting mad at their office. She has the power to change them, I don’t.