The damndest things happen...

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I’m a consultant, currently on a lengthy engagement with a large pharmaceutical company. My job is to pretty much stamp-out fires, fix problems, and help them make deadlines. I’m working the Regulatory Affairs group for this particular client, and they had a fairly serious problem recently.

They’re shifting from one business process to another to support FDA regs, but some of the technolgy supporting the new process had suffered significant delays, and the old process & technology had already been partially dismantled.

Enter yours truly, and a small team of publishers, a developer, and a couple validation types. Three weeks later, we have a nifty little hack, that actually fills the hole in the process, and meets validation requirements! (One week to hack together the App, two weeks of meetings, slain trees, and testing to validate)

This is an ugly little piece of coding, although it actually looks pretty slick on the interface, partially because our developer got pulled after the second day (having mostly completed the interface), and I had to piece together what he’d left behind, fit in the new functions as needed, and iron out the bugs (got most of 'em, any way… :wink: ). It’s nifty, it’s powerful, it’s due to be decommissioned in six months… :frowning:

Not any more!
The client manager stopped by my office today to tell me, out of the blue, that not only was this little hack going to stay in production, it was going back into development cycle, and I’m her lead for the team!

Yeah! Grow, my little tool! Become one with the business process! :smiley:

Oh sh1t! I hate by-the-numbers development work… :eek:

I’m just a bit conflicted here…

That’s all. Mundane, pointless, and I couldn’t keep it to myself… :stuck_out_tongue:

2

Been doing this kind of work long? We always expect apps to stay in production longer than expected (how’s that for a neat little oxymoron?), it’s the way of applications. That’s part of how the whole Y2K fiasco happened.

My thing today was finding out that I’m getting punished for pulling one clusterf&ck of an application design out of the fire* by being pulled into another project in a similar state of disarray. FWIW, the same guy, an alleged superior, designed both. Yippee!

Punish success, reward failure! If it weren’t for stuff like this Scott Adams wouldn’t have anything to write about.

*this means the project was a disaster before I got to it, now everybody loves it and wants it. I can only take partial credit.

3

It’s only been about two, two-and-a-half years that I’ve been trusted to work on large-dollar / high-risk disasters. I’m a hacker by nature, and am frankly far more comfortable working on the infrastructure side of IT. This is my second peice of mission critical work outside the Navy, and the first working on the business side.

This validation on this app was specifically written to be statuitorily useful only to the end of June, that being all the risk the business was willing to take with an ER/ES non-compliant system. Decommissioning was to take place in September (just in case…), but now they’ve decided do fund developer time to clean-up the code and incorperate ER/ES features. I don’t actually have to do the development work, I’m supposed to be the Business Lead / System Owner Liason, which means I’ll be testing the results of what the proper deveolpers output, along with attending meetings, writing memos & SOPs, fitting it into the defined business proceses, and all that other grown-up stuff.

Yutch.

And it’s largely my own fault I have to grow up now… :stuck_out_tongue:

Standard Navy slogan: Work the workers, and slack the slackers. Any other way invites disaster…

4

I’m feverishly (really, my forehead is hot and I’m sweaty!) pushing into production a custom module that will have to be mostly dismantled in July when we upgrade.

Hey, it’s work, I was unemployed for a year before this.

As the kids say, “It’s all good!”

5

That’s about the size of it…

When next version of the content-management piece releases, the original purpose of this utility is done, and the memo that authorizes an ER/ES non-compliant system drops dead… But by then, version 2 of the utility will be validated, and written into the business processes. It’ll have a home, but will spend most of time collecting dust (after having saved four submissions).

As you said… It’s work. :smiley: