Work Rant. Day in the life of an I.T. Guy

SixPapaCharlie

SixPapaCharlie

May the force be with you
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Background: For this rant you need to know:
"process a claim" = push a button and it goes out to downstream systems unvalidated. A monkey could do it.
"Validate a claim" means cleaning up a lot of errors and then processing. It takes thought decision making.

So where are we?
My team builds a great SAP interface for validating and processing Claims (doesn't matter what a claim is for this rant.)

Resource is hired to use the interface. We will call her Jennifer (because that is her name).
Jennifer is typical data entry level employee (level 2)

For 3 months she is supposed to be getting trained on this interface so when the testing cycle begins she can hit the ground running and I can compare the downstream data to Oracle production.

Her boss whom we will call WasteOfSpace puts no effort into getting her trained BUT reports training level: expert.

Great!! Let the bonuses fly.

Yesterday Jennifer comes to me and says "I am over my head and this is too much work and I am not capable of doing all of this. Just validating a claim takes a long time and by the way, please don't stir the pot and tell WasteOfSpace or his boss. I don't want to ruffle any feathers"

Okay, so now I have a MAJOR risk to my project, you are not going to be able to do the work, WasteOfSpace has been lying about your training and you don't want me to ruffle feathers? This is your Job on the line. you should be ruffling feathers and like months ago.

So last night I become the Samuel L Jackson of feather Ruffling. I'm a badazz MFfing cockatoo and I need a newspaper change. Somehow morph that sentence into me firing off a bunch of emails to WasteofSpace, WasteOfSpace's boss, and GoodGuyBrent (We haven't talked about him yet but you would like him. He is a good guy)

Basically stating "I am concerned that Jennifer has not received the level of training required for her to validate these claims beginning on 3/15. Can you please get with her and asses her comfort level and put together a training program if needed?

Jennifer starts firing off emails all night stating she has processed everything and she is now waiting for more claims to process and she is so fast she is waiting waiting waiting.
I am not stupid and I know the is not validating them, just sending them down.
She is scared of WasteOfSpace (and conflict in general) so he sees her emails and thinks I am an idiot. He has no idea how bad they are going to fail in 11 days.

WasteOfSpace says:
"She mention to me that 35 claims have been processed since Tuesday. Also, this is a new job for her and I am sure it is going to take some time to get use to processing claims in a new SAP system,

I think a lot of the frustration that she is experiencing stems from members of your team keep putting extra pressure on her to be an expert at processing claims in a new system.

In the meantime, please contact me if you have any other concerns about Jennifer and allow her to just concentrate on doing her job. "

Then WasteOfSpace's boss says:
"I just spoke with the team and from my understanding all of the claims have been processed. She is currently waiting on additional claims to be assigned to her by Dev.

Per my request to have a recurring weekly meeting to discuss these types of concerns, issues, risks, etc., this will help dispel any misconceptions and get us all on the same page. Please setup a recurring 30-minute meeting beginning next week

Additionally, I would ask that you route all inquiries through WasteOfSpace and not go to Jennifer directly so that she can continue to focus on processing the claims."


I inform both of them that the meeting already exists and they are both on the invite list but do not seem to be attending.

I remind them that Jennifer came to me (a PM) with the issue instead of coming to her own boss and now they are all pretending that she is on fire and good to go and there is no issue at all.

I truly don't care if they fail after I deliver the project but this game they are playing seriously jeopardizes my testing schedule and puts me at risk for not being test complete at go live.


You know those ads on the radio? "Looking for an exciting career in the field of I.T.?
Well look no further..." They are wrong. I.T. is a stupid political PITA

If I could change careers at this point to something totally different and net similar income, I would be on it in a heart beat.

Rant over.

I need to go flying
 
I don't think stupid political PITA is confined to the field of IT. I think it's more of an issue of your company's organization. You appear to have no flexibility in firing or booting off the project unqualified employees.
 
Sac Arrow said:
I don't think stupid political PITA is confined to the field of IT. I think it's more of an issue of your company's organization. You appear to have no flexibility in firing or booting off the project unqualified employees.
Click to expand...

True.
This is the first gig where I haven't had a team of direct reports.

All our development is done by 3rd party vendors.
Very few actual employees here.
 
How are the test claims configured? How many NEED to be validated? Can you tell how many are actually BEING validated?

Anything involving a human is going to have some claims slip through that should have been validated but weren't. I don't know the actual error percentage for your process, but you should be able to tell if your testing is working at or below that average.

How do are you validating your test results? There is probably a way to show that the testing is not being performed properly.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding - is she just so slow that you can't tell if the process is the bottleneck or that the tester is the bottleneck? Or are invalid claims getting into the system and you can't tell if it's because she is pushing back claims through or if your system is letting them through?
 
You covered your ass keep documenting and you'll be fine.
 
Politics are fun! Just kidding. I may or may not be in the process of applying for a different position internally that should relieve some of the more pointless politics I have to play on a day-to-day basis.
 
saracelica said:
You covered your ass keep documenting and you'll be fine.
Click to expand...

Oh no he didn't. His report got round filed, and management thinks he cried wolf.

Either things will go really wrong and he'll get blamed for schedule slip or undetected bugs, or they will go just fine with a lot of behind the scenes work from him, that management will have no clue ever existed.

The CYA is that the "trainee" is an "expert." That it's fiction is beside the point.

It's the life of an IT guy. That's why I've been a recovering system manager for 20 years.
 
You just need to leverage your synergies man.
 
Just make sure your boss is aware of the situation.

Glad to see its not just me!
 
I just happened to stumble across devs discussing linking customer accounts to a single email domain name and not "allowing" customers to use more than one, in one of their team Slack channels yesterday.

I nicely pointed out as old grey haired system admin that we have eight domain names for email and over 300 overall just for our company, and just let the comment sit in the Slack channel.

The response from the Dev was:
"If we don't put this limitation in, we will have to rewrite all of our APIs and the feature request won't make the deadline."

Bad incentives make for bad software. Yay. LOL.
 
6PC yeah, sounds a typical "day in the life of" situation for IT.

Document EVERYTHING. I probably look like I am asking stupid questions, but I run everything through my boss and her boss. It's all documented. And it's happened a few times where I get blamed for things and I'll politely find that email from 3 months ago where I was asked to do something stupid and just let that speak for itself.

I learned the importance of documentation early on and it has saved me more times than I can count.

Document the meeting with you and her, document the emails between her boss and that persons boss. Document that you documented.

It's ALWAYS political @SixPapaCharlie. Work, like life is a game. It's sometimes just played differently...
 
Gather your evidence, including the email proclaiming that she has "expert status" on the interface. Gather the email chain that shows that WasteOfSpace and his boss both were made aware and advised that this was a non-issue. Raise the issue in your status meeting that there is a failure point and mark the status as "red." Make sure you send out those meeting minutes. Then go forward with your project.

Why?

Because, when it fails, you're going to fall back on your RACI diagram and advised that you consulted and advised, provided meeting minutes, made your concerns known, and nobody took notice. Hard to blame the PM when you took the action necessary to advise, but the responsible parties didn't take action to remediate and you've reported it as such in your status meeting (which WasteofSpace and his superior didn't attend.)
 
Never allow someone to quantify their own "expert" status or their boss. Write up a quiz on the interface, give it to everyone, and grade it.
 
dans2992 said:
Just make sure your boss is aware of the situation.

Glad to see its not just me!
Click to expand...

My boss is super cool.
I said "You know this date is going to slip right"

She just goes "Duh... Keep doing what you are doing"
 
I have some cars to be crushed and a sledge hammer if you need to apply some physicality to the spleen venting.
 
Matthew said:
How are the test claims configured? How many NEED to be validated? Can you tell how many are actually BEING validated?

Anything involving a human is going to have some claims slip through that should have been validated but weren't. I don't know the actual error percentage for your process, but you should be able to tell if your testing is working at or below that average.

How do are you validating your test results? There is probably a way to show that the testing is not being performed properly.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding - is she just so slow that you can't tell if the process is the bottleneck or that the tester is the bottleneck? Or are invalid claims getting into the system and you can't tell if it's because she is pushing back claims through or if your system is letting them through?
Click to expand...



first test is a 2 week integration test where nothing needs to be validated.
I need to make sure all the data is flowing where it needs to go.

on 3/15 we start a 3 month parallel production run where we have to validate and close 3 months and compare the data in test to prod. So starting in 11 days, she needs to be able to validate all the claims for Jan, Feb, and March using the actual claims that were worked in the old system in prod.

The girl that has been doing it in the old system can do a whole month in about 4 days.
The new system is much faster but Jennifer is taking a 2 days to get 1 days worth of claims validated.
 
SixPapaCharlie said:
Rant over.

I need to go flying
Click to expand...

What happened to GoodGuyBruce? We never got to meet him!

There are elements of this story that are showing up in at least 3 projects my team have going. We really should go flying and swap war stories. I wanted to pick your brain on some project management tools my guys are proposing, too.
 
Kinda sounds like an excellent opportunity to replace Jennifer with a computer. :)

A co-worker used to have this sticker on the lid of his laptop:
"Go away, or I will replace you with a very small shell script."

Back in the days before they'd make him remove it because it triggered "micro-aggressions" in meetings when the people on the other side of the table had to stare at it while he worked and wasn't listening to them whine about [insert whatever he was coding to get rid of their problem as they spoke - here].
 
GoodGuyBrent is my Muscle when things go south.
He is included on all emails.

He reports to d***headDavid (from my pokes holes in the coffee cups thread)
He applies a lot of pressure to make dates that are pointless because of d**kheadDavid.

However, when he sees nonsense like this, he is good about going to the top and putting a stop to nonsense.
I need to debrief w/ him soon.
 
We need an org chart to keep up. Mix it in with your next As the Prop Turns... :)
 
SixPapaCharlie said:
first test is a 2 week integration test where nothing needs to be validated.
I need to make sure all the data is flowing where it needs to go.

on 3/15 we start a 3 month parallel production run where we have to validate and close 3 months and compare the data in test to prod. So starting in 11 days, she needs to be able to validate all the claims for Jan, Feb, and March using the actual claims that were worked in the old system in prod.

The girl that has been doing it in the old system can do a whole month in about 4 days.
The new system is much faster but Jennifer is taking a 2 days to get 1 days worth of claims validated.
Click to expand...

As the part owner of my business, let me just tell you how this appears to the higher ups:

I.T. is magic. The I.T. tech's job (that's yours) is to make magic happen. Don't give me your jargon filled excuses that I don't understand as to why magic didn't happen. Make magic happen, or I'll find another tech who will.
 
PPC1052 said:
As the part owner of my business, let me just tell you how this appears to the higher ups:

I.T. is magic. The I.T. tech's job (that's yours) is to make magic happen. Don't give me your jargon filled excuses that I don't understand as to why magic didn't happen. Make magic happen, or I'll find another tech who will.
Click to expand...

Which is exactly how IT becomes a "Department" with huge overhead and little real impact to the bottom line, and certainly no requirement that it either make or save the company money.

Next "Department" after IT, is "QA" so there's someone to blame that nobody in "leadership" paid any attention to the "jargon" and went golfing instead.
 
When I was in IT I just told a person in authority about any problems I saw and recommended one or more solutions.

If you're not in charge, that's all you can really do. If someone in authority makes bad choices, that's on them. If I'm working for someone else, I just do my job to the best of my ability, then I go home at the end of the day and don't worry about it.
 
PPC1052 said:
As the part owner of my business, let me just tell you how this appears to the higher ups:

I.T. is magic. The I.T. tech's job (that's yours) is to make magic happen. Don't give me your jargon filled excuses that I don't understand as to why magic didn't happen. Make magic happen, or I'll find another tech who will.
Click to expand...

But there's a reason you milk a cow and not a pig. As the owner you can't employ a bunch of pigs and expect them to produce enough milk to run your business no matter how magical your IT guy is.
 
EdFred said:
But there's a reason you milk a cow and not a pig. As the owner you can't employ a bunch of pigs and expect them to produce enough milk to run your business no matter how magical your IT guy is.
Click to expand...

Oh, I don't disagree. But I know how some of my partners think.
 
Query: Data entry specialist is level 2? What is level 1 -- bathroom janitor?
 
Asses her comfort level and assess her comfort level are two distinctly separate concepts.
Personally, I like the first....but not sure about the adverb.
 
You know SAP really means "Stop All Production".

We have a heavily customized Global SAP deployment that added at least 40% to the code base of the out of the box SAP. We just get people trained to an acceptable level then jump ship, some to SAP America as consultants for 3 times the money.

Back to square 1
 
Scrabo said:
You know SAP really means "Stop All Production".

We have a heavily customized Global SAP deployment that added at least 40% to the code base of the out of the box SAP. We just get people trained to an acceptable level then jump ship, some to SAP America as consultants for 3 times the money.

Back to square 1
Click to expand...

SAP where data goes to die
 
Sounds pretty grisly. How do you keep from slitting your wrists ? At least you get to work from home right ?
 
6PC wrote: "If I could change careers at this point to something totally different and net similar income,"

It's those last three words that keep many, many people I know in the world of IT - Software - High-Tech. I empathize and wish you the best... in patience and in Scotch.
 
Thanks for letting the rest of us feel somewhat better, temporarily, about our non-IT jobs!
 
6PC --- I feel your pain. I spent 37 years in the computer science business and saw this kind of crap play out time and time again.
The operative expression right now is CYA.
Document everything, and try to put as much distance between your self and ground zero.
 
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