OMG, Peoplesoft!!!

We've been cursed with peoplesoft too - all our accounting stuff/hr stuff is done on it and now -- they're switching Registration and Records to it. . . .

The plan is to NOT have someone stab you with a real knife, right?

How much cred do you get if you allow them to stab you in a non-vital area so as to maneuver into position for a decisive blow while their knife arm is entangled?

Soooo.... it's all YOUR fault?

Not my fault!! The organization wants people to go from index cards to a comprehensive database. It's THEIR fault! I'm just talking about it. For 28 pages, so far.

Universities are creative places where people do things in different ways.

Ain't just universities. I work for a company about 40,000 strong, and sometimes we get the software altered to fit the way we work. Except there is no way we work. We're an amalgam of about 15 companies, some of which still maintain independent IT groups, and really have their own ways of both doing business and implementing software solutions.

It is a bitch, and also the reason I have a job.

But sometimes, and don't think it won't pain some members of the software implementation group, the code just won't do that. Not for amounts of money the buyer is willing to spend.

On a much smaller scale, they changed out the line-of-business software at the krav centre. The people that actually had to use it raised such a ruckus with management and the vendor that it was taken off in a month. Now they're on their second attempt at new software. The cursing seems to be quieter, but it's amazing how many methods of working that just seem to make sense can't be done without extra cost in a number of packages.

My main beef with the software situation here is that about half of what we use is proprietary. Someone was hired to create it specifically for us. This someone is always hired by Upper Management with no input from the people who will actually be using the shiny new software. Instead, we get handed a new database/accounting/whatever system with buggy bells and whistles that we don't need, and missing several essential features, and we just figure out how to work around it. After a year, a survey will come around asking how the software is working out and what improvements we'd like to suggest (and then, as far as I can tell, the surveys are simply buried in soft peat for three months before being fed to the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal).

It amazes me how much money is wasted paying developers to create software with no user input at all about what we actually need. (And then more money is spent on time-management seminars after Upper Management notices that we're not as efficient as we could be, maybe because we spend hours and hours a day wrestling with the idiotically designed software they were so proud of comissioning for us.)

t /takes notes for Stupid Thesis

In other random news, I just started watching Walking Tall, and the Rock's family (parents, sister, nephew) looks more like they could be a real family than I've seen in a movie in a long time.

Coming from the other side (a member of a management team who implemented a new software system company-wide), we did want to change some old business processes to match the new software because our old practices were not efficient, etc.

But, we did interviews with every single person in the company to understand their job and how they did it. After assessing the processes from a bigger picture, we changed them. For some people, that mean more work, but overall, it is significantly less work.

Also, we did change the software to fit our processes when it made more sense to do that.

Our process changes were definitely done thoughtfully, with a lot of discussion and input from those who do them.

How much cred do you get if you allow them to stab you in a non-vital area so as to maneuver into position for a decisive blow while their knife arm is entangled?

Probably a fair amount, if it's clear that taking the stab was a decision. Though, even if you fuck up, finishing alive and disabling the attacker is a win.

Someone was hired to create it specifically for us. This someone is always hired by Upper Management with no input from the people who will actually be using the shiny new software.

This is a weird position to be put in. Sometimes, as business analyst, I'm denied access to the eventual end users. Or I'm given access to one, who swears up and down that what she does is the one true way, and everyone does it that way. Because management is unwilling to allocate their resources to the requirements gathering process, requirements fall by the wayside.

Sometimes the end users get tetchy at being asked questions. And I'm always stunned by the number of users who know what they're doing, but don't know why, or what happens to the work product once it leaves their line of sight. The minute they realise they don't know, and that I've noticed they don't know, things start to get tense.

And then there are things that we discover the end users are doing in their as is flow, but no one can agree on the to be version. There's always someone who gets pissy when you try and stop them from doing what they were doing, and someone else who has extravagant ideas of how things should actually go, and is upset when their idea doesn't make the feature list.

And sometimes the software sucks.

I just had a somewhat reassuring talk with my manager about the temporary reassignment -- he's of the opinion that the E-Commerce section is the least fucked-up module of the SAP reconnect, so I may be dealing with something that is at least tolerable. But still.. it's E-Com, so intended to be used by customers, so it'd better have a user-friendly interface, which I have yet to see demonstrated in a single SAP module to date.

Because mamangement is unwilling to allocate their resources to the requirements gathering process, requirements fall by the wayside.

This is the problem where I work. It's an ungodly bureaucratic company, and there's really nothing anyone can do about it. It's just too big.

But our website was completely unusable to Mac-users for almost a year after its launch, and that's a huge chunk of clients in the video production business. We pointed this out repeatedly to Management, and then got bitched at for not making enough web sales. And so it goes.