September 13th, 2012 6:07pm
Sometimes my work amazes me.
I was told this story today:
My employer has a bunch of credit cards that employees use to pay for things and every week or so the bank sends a bill listing what’s been bought with each one. This brings with it a requirement to verify what’s been bought, so my colleague wrote an application that reads in the bill and then provides the users with a web page where they can acknowledge that’s what they’ve bought. At some point it was decided that this was too complex a procedure and the application was rewritten so it just emails the users with their lists and presumably they flag things up with Finance if they spot something wrong.
At some point someone looked at this procedure and decided they really needed the users to verify each transaction in, you know, some sort of application, instead of just being sent a list.
Someone in finance was then tasked with investigating the available products and aside from the application my colleague wrote it turns out that banks provide software that does this for free! Not only that but they also offer discounts if you use it! There was also a product (let’s call it “X”) that cost several thousand pounds, but when he went to other councils who use it to see what they thought they said it was awful and we should avoid it at all costs.
So he wrote all this into his report, passed it onto his boss and didn’t hear anything back until it was announced we’d bought product X…
Management: wasting tax-payers money one shitty product at a time.
- local government
- scotland
- idiocy
- don't even get me started on microsoft