It's taken me too long to realise what's up with me this week...
Every public library in the country provides internet access to the public via The People's Network. Which is actually a couple of hundred local solutions under the same banner. And a real pig of a project for the systems people involved (librarians + library management + corporate IT + set deadline for delivery = sheer bloody murder). It was not fun and, if I were blogging at the time, (a) I'd be down to a quarter of an hour's sleep a night and (b) this blog would be six times as congested as it is now.
I'd hoped that was history, done and dusted. But it becomes more and more apparent that history is repeating itself. Except that this time I have no idea what the IT guys are being asked to do or when and no scope whatsoever for papering over the policy holes in the whole caper. Milton's approach to project management on this one is to have lots of meetings and conversations with IT over a series of months and then every so often tell me all the things that we could be doing at some point in an uncertain future. Any questions I have about how we want to manage the new delivery model; what key resources do we want to emphasise on the user interfaces; and how we want the customer interface to work are waffled away.
It's tempting to walk away from the whole sorry mess but it's a dead certainty that it'll be my job to wave a magic wand and make everything better.
4 comments:
Hang on, mate, I'm still trying to answer the intriguing question you've posed in your post title ...
Stick with it old son, it's crowded here in the Jobseekers Allowance queue.
David: We'll hang on. You might want to work it out with a pencil.
Barry: Thanks mate! I spent far too much of the eighties in the queue and it wasn't fun. I don't envy anyone having the system inflicted on them these days.
Magic wand? Where did you obtain it, I think I need one myself. Is it poison-tipped? Here's hoping...
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