Whiling away the time...

If I weren't getting in some good personal working time, I'd be out of my mind! My current job wasn't challenging anyway and now that a) I'm out of here next week and b) the work is really slow - it's gotten even worse LOL Seriously, I can see how the long term planning piece of this job could be kind of neat but the day to day maintenance stuff is just tedious and time consuming.

I'm going to rant a bit here about some stuff I should probably put on my technical communication blog but oh well... Biggie rule - a tool should NEVER break a process! Tools (either software, hardware, or whatever) should be designed to facilitate a process and should at least attempt to integrate with how things are done. Admitted, there are times when the process has to change to work with a tool but those changes are normally along the lines of enforcing policies that have been let go. People whine a bit but it's usually not a huge deal.

However, my experience here has shown me how big an impact a poorly designed and implemented tool can have on an already unwieldy process. The tool (I'll call it Kick Me Now) took a process that was reasonably good although not problem free and split it into two or three pieces that DON'T INTEGRATE WITH EACH OTHER! How's that for good software development planning? KMN is also missing key (dare I say vital/necessary) features that you practically can get nothing done without. For example - email notification when you're assigned a task. Not everyone uses KMN on a daily basis so they aren't always running in to see if something's been assigned to them. The old tool had the nifty little email that showed up and told you what was going on. This tool - has nothing.

What's even worse is that there's all this concern over backlog of work and a big part of it was due to lack of notification. People didn't know stuff was assigned to them so it just sat there. I think the group has found some type of tedious manual way to get around the non-notification problem but still...

As it turns out, KMN was developed from specs that were around four (count 'em four) years old BEFORE the tool was completed. Now, they're probably about 6 years old. What a disaster...

Oh the upside - I managed to get all my edits done to my academic writing samples, got the applications filled out, designed & printed the app cover sheets and sent my writing samples to jneal for some additional editing. As of today, all that's left is to get drwick's letter of rec and transcripts from two more schools. I'll then write my letter to the director, write my check & stuff both apps into an overnight package to PSU! Yay - only another week or so before the app is in...