The more serious user!Now in the past I may have intimated that the users that we have may not be a threat to the reputation of Albert Einstien, but I’d like to reveal that we do have some users that do indeed have an I.Q. that may in fact be in double figures. These users are almost invariably in positions of responsibility, sometimes management so what you have to do to deal with them can be a little tricky.
Now to put all this into perspective, we are about to embark on an alignment project to forestall the likelihood that incompatibility problems will arise in the future. These are as a result of the half baked way that we were forced to start the project, by Slinky and the BIC – which is a real possibility given the standard of the project plan. There are lots of things that could go wrong with the work that is planned, however we’ll still have to do the work and accept the risks that it entails – and this is where the problem with the users comes about. Traditionally the users have carried out end to end tests whenever anything has been done, this is no longer a practical option as we will in the main have only two maintenance weekends per year from now on.
So with the bank holiday weekend on it’s way, it was decided that this was an opportunity to sort out some of the problems that we were likely to face. But how to do it without testing things to the far end of a fart, well the answer turned out to be simplicity it’s self – don’t tell the users exactly how much work we are doing. That translates to, we have to have the systems out for an extended period from this point in time. This as it turns out was the way we used to do things, we’d take the systems on a Sunday and have the whole day to do what we needed to do – provided the systems were back in place on the Monday nobody cared. So as it turns out the easiest way to bring the users round to your point of view is to lie to them!
