And I have twice victoriously crossed the Acheron

I recently complained about the project management on our new call centre service. Our experience is not unique...

"Like you, we gave our project managers all the details, costs and contacts for the licences to access our LMS last October. Three times. All went quiet for a bit until they asked us for the same details again last month. Twice. And four times again this month. I've just done the training for call centre staff on illegal copies of the client software. And we go live at the beginning of next month. I wouldn't mind, I'd done the difficult bit: we'd finally closed one of our libraries a couple of years ago so I set the call centre up as that library on the system just before Xmas, thereby saving the project one grand and roughly two months.

"We've lost the funding for one member of staff; had twenty-one generations of Visio flowcharts; a flurry of mind-boggling statements about the services that will be within scope ("This is how we see us answering the telephone call: 'Hello, I want to reserve a book.'"); and we're going to be served by a call centre with nine, count them! nine, telephone numbers. So far.

"My money's on the software being bought some time next October. In any other organisation I'd suspect sabotage or internal politics but our IT people have form such that I can only put the situation down to sheer bloody incompetence."