Efficiency AND Effectiveness. I just had to share this.

Hello All,

I know I said I wouldn't say any more on this, and this is about an Oracle 
system but I just have to share this.

My wife has, for over 2 years, been project leading, for her dept. (she is in 
finance) a project to automate their current system, not a biggy. Now they had 
it in the USA for 12 months and not one working program, this was mainly 
because the MIS manager did not believe you needed to talk to the user to know 
what they wanted, I think he is cleaning toilets now. Anyways the US washed 
their hands of it and the UK took over, so they did a little talking to the 
user and they are now in UAT. 

So my wife is the ONLY one on the system working at home and asked me to time 
(what they call a report but it is a display) a report, Invoices not yet 
invoiced, 1 country, 2,000 records, 38 seconds. All countries 51,000 records 
2Mins 47seconds. I think we would all agree not acceptable. Also there is no 
way that the user can ever see more than the first 5,000 records bit of a 
problem for the UK who had 5,500. 

Now we come to the clever part, when they first ran this last week it crashed 
because 6 users ran it at once, so they changed it so each request was queued. 
Now we move from the merely clever to the brilliant. But if it doesn't run 
within 60 seconds it is cancelled and a message is sent asking the user to try 
again later. They decided that this info was too good to only give to the 
requestor, everybody should get the message (merely a case of lazy programming 
I think). Well in a meeting about this my wife pointed out to the MIS manager 
that there could be 1,000+ users on when this goes live and with the response 
times she was getting that everyone would be getting messages all the time, and 
now from the brilliant to the sheer genius, his immediate reaction? He started 
calculating how much extra disk space they would need to buy to handle it!

A shining example of analysis, design, and testing. Talk about skilled 
professionals! I mean, you would need to take special courses to be so bad, 
wouldn't you?  Where do they get these people from?    

And now I shall hide before I am told off!!   :-)

Steve

Steve Raby
GEP Contractor (Mulix)
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