on the edge...

So, I officially went over the deep-end at work today. Many months ago I blogged about my boss coming out of her office and sitting under my co-worker's desk... at about 2:30pm this afternoon, I went under my own desk. Actually stretched out, and laid there for 5 minutes.

I was pretty much done, and the last straw was poking me in the eyeball. We've been working on getting our website out (let me be honest, I've been working on getting our website up), and it keeps getting pushed back month after month. The last push was due because she wanted to wait until the new person was hired, so they could rework some of the learning map documents that we created to be put up there.

Now, please understand, I'm going where no other client in the history of my company has gone before. I want dynamically generated reports that I can update components of on the fly on our intranet site, which is Lotus Notes driven (need I say more to the techies in the room?). That's the only way to keep over 200 pieces of paper updated quickly, building out the components in a database. The normal solution is they make you upload 200 static documents that have to be pulled-down, fixed, and re-uploaded... which I don't have the time or patience to do, when I just have to add 2 words to a column.

I built what I wanted in Access, to give the intranet team an idea of what I wanted the database to do. I didn't want to confuse them with building it in sql, as that would just be over the top. Then I had to coordinate with marketing on the look and feel of the html based user interface. They are actually a joy to work with... whereas with a certain IS team, their response to me was, "I'll give you the basics, and if you can prove to me that you have high traffic, then we'll build you something else." Somehow that seems counter productive. People aren't going to repeat visit a piece of crap. But I got my basic database, however ugly and clunky it displays.

Do you know how many fake "go lives" I've had with this thing? Let's see, I started working on it before Thanksgiving last year, so that puts us at about 5. She finally agreed on a date... I knew exactly what I was supposed to do, and I was precisely going to have it done for Sept 2.

Yeah... then the world got involved. Suddenly this is more high-profile than she ever mentioned, and how many times I've said that they only gave us one page, we can't put the world on it, seems to fall on deaf ears. So what's that mean? It means I'm stuck trying to make the thing jump on it's head and spin, while still making it visually pleasing and not gaudy.

Then she felt "out of the loop", so suddenly, I now have to spend all of my time writing elaborate plans, and meet just to meet so that everyone can understand the plans. All the while the clock is still ticking down to Sept 2.

I finally talked them off the ledge, as my coworker finished writing the maps ahead of schedule, and I was imputing them at a rapid rate... I actually finished all of them today. We also had a HUGE discussion on what I've been calling Phase 2 - and how we can put more bells and whistles in that.

But - this morning, for some reason, SOMEONE couldn't recall having that HUGE discussion about putting certain things in Phase 2, even when 2 of her team members said the opposite. Finally I said, "LOOK, it's 9:30am, I have a 2 hour meeting beginning at 10am, then an interview from 3-4:30 with a new applicant. We have user testing on Tuesday, I need to finish uploading my main priority in the 2 hours I have to work on it this afternoon, when I'm not attending your meetings. If you can get it to me by noon, I can begin prepping for all the work I need to do on it on Monday - if not, it doesn't go in." I never saw them move so fast.... one was so stressed she scheduled a massage for this evening.

So what's the problem, why is this taking so much time? Well, using Lotus Notes databases to upload content and display it in an html fashion is time consuming. Here's my process:

There is one document that lists 22 leadership competencies. Each competency has it's own behavior assessment - 22 behavior assessments. But, there's 5 levels of leadership, so multiply that by 5. As lotus notes databases work, I have to upload each behavior assessment individually, creating an entry into the database. I then have to go to the web, access the generated webpage, and find the specific URL for that document, it's not displayed when the entry is created. I then have to go back to the one document listing the 22 competencies, and link the assessment field to the uploaded behavior assessment. This is so that the user can access the main webpage, see the list of competencies and click on the assessment links for each one and have them displayed to be printed. Plus, there are random changes that need to be made to the main user page, and now they want all of these additional features, including a document library.

What put me over the edge, is that when I was moving around the leadership assessment, which is in Word, the lines on the table would not line up. I had to add a column, but there were header rows. To add the column without messing up the header rows, I had to delete them. When I went to put the 3 rows back in, they would not line up with the rest of the table. It was less then a pixel difference, yet I know that it would be the first thing my boss noticed.

See, she doesn't understand technology, so she doesn't get the process I just described or how much work that is, all she cares about is if it's pretty. So, that would be the first thing she noticed. To fix it, I would pretty much have to delete the entire table, and recreate it from scratch with the additional column already on it. Here I am, doing more work than necessary, because SOMEONE didn't remember that this whole stupid assessment thing was supposed to be PHASE 2.

Don't even get me started about usability. Maybe because it's generational, but some things on the web are just obvious to me. Like when there is a red asterisk next to a field, and down below a red asterisk next to the word "Required". Somehow I get that you are supposed to enter data into that field.... but no, they want a long narrative explaining it. So I wrote the long narrative to explain it in the directions at the top of the page... but now they claim that people don't read directions, so now they want the words right next to the field, along with the long narrative at the top, and the continued red asterisk thing... sigh...