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I have made the IT guys grumpy.
May. 12th, 2022 10:50 amI have been brought in as a subject matter expert on an IT project that's been going on for quite some time now. There has been a lot of development work done to set up a system by which some number of people can confirm that a particular sort of event that affects our industrial process is happening and needs to be responded to.
They should have brought me (or someone from the process control team) in as a subject matter expert on this project when it was just getting going instead of when it was almost done and needed some details ironed out, because almost the first question I asked was "why are you setting up this complicated confirmation process when the process control system already has an indicator for this event and you can send notifications when the indicator gets tripped?"
blank stares. "It does?"
"It does."
I confirmed that the indicator a) worked and b) had valid logic for detecting the event. I drew a cute little Microsoft Paint diagram explaining it all. I sent it to the project manager who agreed that it was much simpler and would result in more timely notifications - almost immediate instead of possibly waiting for 45 minutes to an hour to pass through a series of escalations on the confirmation process.
The developer is now kind of upset that I'm asking him to throw out lots of hours of work and go back to the beginning, and I understand that that represents sweat and tears and pulled-out hair on his part... but you know, if they were working on the wrong thing...?
You don't get the right answers if you're starting by asking the wrong people the wrong questions.
They should have brought me (or someone from the process control team) in as a subject matter expert on this project when it was just getting going instead of when it was almost done and needed some details ironed out, because almost the first question I asked was "why are you setting up this complicated confirmation process when the process control system already has an indicator for this event and you can send notifications when the indicator gets tripped?"
blank stares. "It does?"
"It does."
I confirmed that the indicator a) worked and b) had valid logic for detecting the event. I drew a cute little Microsoft Paint diagram explaining it all. I sent it to the project manager who agreed that it was much simpler and would result in more timely notifications - almost immediate instead of possibly waiting for 45 minutes to an hour to pass through a series of escalations on the confirmation process.
The developer is now kind of upset that I'm asking him to throw out lots of hours of work and go back to the beginning, and I understand that that represents sweat and tears and pulled-out hair on his part... but you know, if they were working on the wrong thing...?
You don't get the right answers if you're starting by asking the wrong people the wrong questions.
