Oh, but surely you’ve got a signed (agreed) scope… well, we normally do. The fun part is when two different departments (ours/ours, or ours/theirs) don’t talk to each other. I may, or may not, have mentioned we’re setting up some data centres and deploying Zero Trust for all our support access, except the migration team from the old data centres want the customer personnel - counting above 150 credentials - to be as-is, not via Zero Trust because, well, they told them they’d do it this way before Zero Trust became a requirement.
The killer part is the migration team see it as a service issue (business as usual) because it’s to do with logins, yet it’s in their legally binding design which ignores Zero Trust when migrating users, so we can’t enforce Zero Trust.
Kills me. Just like the customer thinking everything is in the Zero Trust Offline Password Vault (actually an online system, but with physical hard copy of password split across two physical safes), yet our Security Team demand this should only be the required credentials needed to get a minimum viable environment working so Active Directory is available for everything else… One of them keeps failing to talk to the other, so they occasionally bump into issues, like a lack of secure printing area where our Operation Centre is co-located with the customer staff.
Recently taken possession of new, refurbished offices. First sign of rain: Ceiling tiles came down. Now that is déjà-vu as I worked in the same offices about a decade ago and they did that back then too.
If you want 1990s London go and look at Tim Hunkin’s Secret Life of the Office. Filmed at peak chrome and steel office time at my old office at 123 BPR in Victoria. It features some of my colleagues doing silly things with wads of filthy lucre! Sadly I was out actually earning the necessary to pay for it all at a client site when C4 filmed it. They got their money’s worth by also filming some shots for Secret Life of Lifts there!
As an interesting case study of requirements creep, unless you live on a Scottish island, the still ongoing Ferry Fiasco started around the time this column was first published as noted by another poster. Not IT related, but to quote Jamie from In the Loop/The Thick of It, a catastrafuck nonetheless.
I really enjoy writing application systems if I am allowed access to the key users. I confess that the systems I write are generally what you might call departmental, rather than enterprise, but they have 10 - 100+ users and they tend to perform whole verticals. One of the very real differences writing systems today versus the 1980's is the knowledge of the Subject Matter Experts. In the 1980's it was either the first or second time the business activity was being computerised. SME's had years of experience and understood what they did for a living AND all of the ramifications up and down. In the 2020's so-called SME's were appointed from University 18 months ago and barely understand what the company does. I'm generalising of course! Last system I delivered, the SME was brilliant! (Mind you he was 78 and had worked for the organisation for 60 years)
Wow, throwing shade at New York and Hersey in one sentence, and in between paragraph bookends tearing London a new one.
Throw in some fruitcake for London and some hate towards Singapore/Spicy Biryani and you have a trifecta of financial hub hatred and culinary skullduggery.
Oh, but surely you’ve got a signed (agreed) scope… well, we normally do. The fun part is when two different departments (ours/ours, or ours/theirs) don’t talk to each other. I may, or may not, have mentioned we’re setting up some data centres and deploying Zero Trust for all our support access, except the migration team from the old data centres want the customer personnel - counting above 150 credentials - to be as-is, not via Zero Trust because, well, they told them they’d do it this way before Zero Trust became a requirement.
The killer part is the migration team see it as a service issue (business as usual) because it’s to do with logins, yet it’s in their legally binding design which ignores Zero Trust when migrating users, so we can’t enforce Zero Trust.
Kills me. Just like the customer thinking everything is in the Zero Trust Offline Password Vault (actually an online system, but with physical hard copy of password split across two physical safes), yet our Security Team demand this should only be the required credentials needed to get a minimum viable environment working so Active Directory is available for everything else… One of them keeps failing to talk to the other, so they occasionally bump into issues, like a lack of secure printing area where our Operation Centre is co-located with the customer staff.
Non déjà-vu. Is it Jamais-vu?
Recently taken possession of new, refurbished offices. First sign of rain: Ceiling tiles came down. Now that is déjà-vu as I worked in the same offices about a decade ago and they did that back then too.
If you want 1990s London go and look at Tim Hunkin’s Secret Life of the Office. Filmed at peak chrome and steel office time at my old office at 123 BPR in Victoria. It features some of my colleagues doing silly things with wads of filthy lucre! Sadly I was out actually earning the necessary to pay for it all at a client site when C4 filmed it. They got their money’s worth by also filming some shots for Secret Life of Lifts there!
Ah, "scope": signed and agreed long ago, than cheerfully ignored by other parts of the client organism, as soon as a new manager/consultant arrives...
Deja vue, indeed: https://www.theregister.com/2015/07/25/deja_vu_as_customer_forgets_to_tell_us_about_essential_feature_again/
Not that I could remember this piece of yours on my own, but googling "Lahndunnah" just brought it up :-)
PS: I thought "Lahndunnah" might be a real word, until I said it out loud a number times, trying different pronounciations....
As an interesting case study of requirements creep, unless you live on a Scottish island, the still ongoing Ferry Fiasco started around the time this column was first published as noted by another poster. Not IT related, but to quote Jamie from In the Loop/The Thick of It, a catastrafuck nonetheless.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferry_Fiasco_(Scotland)
I really enjoy writing application systems if I am allowed access to the key users. I confess that the systems I write are generally what you might call departmental, rather than enterprise, but they have 10 - 100+ users and they tend to perform whole verticals. One of the very real differences writing systems today versus the 1980's is the knowledge of the Subject Matter Experts. In the 1980's it was either the first or second time the business activity was being computerised. SME's had years of experience and understood what they did for a living AND all of the ramifications up and down. In the 2020's so-called SME's were appointed from University 18 months ago and barely understand what the company does. I'm generalising of course! Last system I delivered, the SME was brilliant! (Mind you he was 78 and had worked for the organisation for 60 years)
Wow, throwing shade at New York and Hersey in one sentence, and in between paragraph bookends tearing London a new one.
Throw in some fruitcake for London and some hate towards Singapore/Spicy Biryani and you have a trifecta of financial hub hatred and culinary skullduggery.
Très magnifique!
Your second client seems to be experiencing continual engagements with the Interior League (https://dc.fandom.com/wiki/Interior_League).