Well Done.
It's Not officially a Friday,
But due to the seasonal nature of this week it is.
Now what to do till home time.....
"Your first mistake was asking for input," I explain to the Boss as he scans the huge volume of new email in his Inbox. "You really don't want to do that." "No," the PFY echoes, "Never do that." "Why not?" "Never seek user input on a technical document unless what you're asking about is so vague as to be useless," the PFY …
"OK. So: First ALT-A, then drag them all into the Deleted Items folder."
CTRL-A/CMD-A, Delete: any really important stuff will be sent again in a few days... loads of correspondence dealt with and plenty of time left for other stuff - *that's* Getting Things Done ;-)
Of course if the boss had asked the IT team to handle the responses in the first place any tech worth his salt would have taken that as an out-of-band special project (at double time) and spent at least three days of the four day bank holiday week developing and testing a horrendously complex mail filter / rule set to classify, sort, redirect and file the responses automatically. The net result of this "data cleansing" would, of course, reduce the incoming flow to effectively only two emails; those matching the filter "If (sender matches BOFH@company.com) or (sender matches PFY@company.com) move email to mailbox APPROVED, append file 'approved_by_CEO.txt', forward to PURCHASING@company.com"
VM as in you have an empty desk? I think Simon could really make something of upgrading the whole company to virtual (non-existent as opposed to the other kind) machines and cloud (perhaps by filling the building with smoke through the aircon). Man, this material just writes itself, doesn't it?
Thanks for a most intriguing suggestion. I'm still trying my damndest to sell a BOFH TV series - I've accumulated enough rejection letters now to wallpaper my office - but in spite of that I'm starting to plan the third series. In which the BOFH needs to find a new job.
Interviewed by Dominic... hmm, I can see where that's going to go. Yep, I really like that idea.
The icon's not a spoiler, because we know how it'll end up. But the journey will be entertaining, I can definitely promise that.
I'm not certain that anybody would survive the experience, but I'd pay good money to watch Dominic against the BOFH in an interview...
Whilst it might be fun to watch the fur fly, there's the much more sinister possibility that they actually get along... Would it be worth the risk?
"Course you can! You put out a memo saying that you're heartened by the huge number of responses and that many very valid issues have been raised and will need further discussion. So much discussion that you're forming a small development discussion group which will meet each lunchtime until all the issues are sorted out, prioritised and project planned."
Methinks that is patently presently designated as the workings of Cabinets, Simon. A sad and traditionally bad and even quite mad collection of motley blunt tools failing admirably, in this posting modern technocratic age of rolling and roiling events news and deep packet intelligence injection analysis views, to not be discovered and uncovered as fine fetishist fools, and vice versa.
Ah yes. A wide ranging consultation of all stakeholders and other interested parties.
99% want green. 1% want blue. You want blue. You get blue.
If anyone asks, you consulted and did what was requested by "many" stakeholders, being careful not to mention the words "most" or "majority" and very especially to never mention absolute numbers or percentages.
Cynical? Moi?
consult/consultancy /consultant is a very interesting family of words in contemporary business speak.
consultation is of course a process where you ask the users /public what they want, and then ignore it and do what you were going to do anyway.
A consultantcy is an organisation that tells you.what you already knew in a form your executives might listen to.
A consultant is someone who does exactly.what your permanent staff would have done, but gets away before the problems are visible.
But on another topic, the reason BOFH sounds as if its a mole in your own office is because people are people, private sector or public, big company or small, we're all much the same.
Can't believe the amount of negativity about user's ideas. They do sometimes make relevant points or useful suggestions. In such cases they should be taken on-board.
Of course, you will claim that you had already thought of them and that the fact that your ideas are the same is indicative of the passionate customer focus you have. You can also praise the users creative thinking which means you will always have someone in the future to support any ideas you put forward.