The Fighter Innudated by Waste
Arg.
There are probably two major points in this post:
1) Boo wasted resources.
and
2) Update on Isaac's Life!
1) So; in order to "more efficiently" design a digtal system to consolidate the GPO's services, we hired a contractor. Makes sense. The cost to the government is $30,000,000 plus cost. That's $30 million plus the cost of all of the junk, and the people's salaries. Apparently, this is perfectly reasonable. Fine, whatever. However, I start to have problems when the contrater hires totatally random people, and then sticks them uselessly with us. I have problems when the contractor doesn't explain thier process to us. I have problems when the contractor, in a presentation to our stakeholders (basically customers), doesn't explain how they are going to apply thier business model to our project. I have problems when only 2 people really know what's going on with the prject, and those two people aren't even permenently assigned to our project. Grr. I'm really glad they didn't ask me to talk to the contractor about this. Heads would roll.
Also, the GPO has about 1500 employees. Another project we are working on is preparing existing content for ingest into the new fancy system with all the bells and whistles. One slight issue we're having is that there are about 1.2 million documents that need to be processed. Oh, by the way, in those documents, any number of them may be duplicates. So, me and another programmer looked at this problem and said "Let's write a script to do it!" Only one problem: the people who are currently doing the job seem to think that if they give up even the slightest amount of information about what they do the GPO will fire them. Given that I have only heard of the GPO firing one person, I don't think that's very likely. Also, please note that the person who got fired stole $10,000 work of ink from the GPO (printer cartriages i believe). So, basically we spend about 3 hours determined that they won't let us help them because of some totally irrational fear.
Arg. Welcome to industry.
2) On a lighter note, at the very same presentation that the contractor was useless, I was asked to give the presentation about the results from one of the working groups I was with, Architecture and Infrastructure. Fortunately, I prepared ahead of time, and did what I think was an OK job. Apparently though, it was rather impressive that an intern gave this presentation in front of the heads of various departments within the GPO. That made my week. Other than that, not much has happened since I last posted a real update. I am surviving by my onesieis at Pam's, given that the two dogs give me plenty of stuff to do, as well as making sure I eat enough to survive (the dogs remind me when it's time to eat). Baj called yesterday, and we had a nice conversation, so that was pretty cool.
Ah well.
Au revoire!
There are probably two major points in this post:
1) Boo wasted resources.
and
2) Update on Isaac's Life!
1) So; in order to "more efficiently" design a digtal system to consolidate the GPO's services, we hired a contractor. Makes sense. The cost to the government is $30,000,000 plus cost. That's $30 million plus the cost of all of the junk, and the people's salaries. Apparently, this is perfectly reasonable. Fine, whatever. However, I start to have problems when the contrater hires totatally random people, and then sticks them uselessly with us. I have problems when the contractor doesn't explain thier process to us. I have problems when the contractor, in a presentation to our stakeholders (basically customers), doesn't explain how they are going to apply thier business model to our project. I have problems when only 2 people really know what's going on with the prject, and those two people aren't even permenently assigned to our project. Grr. I'm really glad they didn't ask me to talk to the contractor about this. Heads would roll.
Also, the GPO has about 1500 employees. Another project we are working on is preparing existing content for ingest into the new fancy system with all the bells and whistles. One slight issue we're having is that there are about 1.2 million documents that need to be processed. Oh, by the way, in those documents, any number of them may be duplicates. So, me and another programmer looked at this problem and said "Let's write a script to do it!" Only one problem: the people who are currently doing the job seem to think that if they give up even the slightest amount of information about what they do the GPO will fire them. Given that I have only heard of the GPO firing one person, I don't think that's very likely. Also, please note that the person who got fired stole $10,000 work of ink from the GPO (printer cartriages i believe). So, basically we spend about 3 hours determined that they won't let us help them because of some totally irrational fear.
Arg. Welcome to industry.
2) On a lighter note, at the very same presentation that the contractor was useless, I was asked to give the presentation about the results from one of the working groups I was with, Architecture and Infrastructure. Fortunately, I prepared ahead of time, and did what I think was an OK job. Apparently though, it was rather impressive that an intern gave this presentation in front of the heads of various departments within the GPO. That made my week. Other than that, not much has happened since I last posted a real update. I am surviving by my onesieis at Pam's, given that the two dogs give me plenty of stuff to do, as well as making sure I eat enough to survive (the dogs remind me when it's time to eat). Baj called yesterday, and we had a nice conversation, so that was pretty cool.
Ah well.
Au revoire!