In my third month, I was struggling under the load of some particularly dense busywork. Miha would forward me lists of hundreds of names and codes, and, since the codes were formed in an old system, he had me use a stupidly complex algorithm to find the new code. I asked him more than once, if this information is all in the database, why can't he just retrieve it there, instead of opeining to clients and doing a weird sequence of steps? He would answer that this is the fastest way he knows.
Fast forward. I know he was lying. A simple query would have saved hours of work and confusion. At the time I trusted him not to waste my soul on that kind of stupidity. Still, my creativity needed an outlet, so I programmed his ridiculous little algorithm, and would consistantly give him the results in under 10 minutes. He was sometimes confused, asking how I did it, but mostly he didn't care, he just gave me more and more lists. Later I learned that some of the boys in the data ware house were actually annoyed at him for giving me such mindless work. If only they knew that I wasn't even doing that much. I needed too much time for the process project.
And the process project was an exercise in patience. Nobody understood the process. It wasn't documented anywhere. The boss would call horribly unproductive meetings to discuss the process with people who didn't have any clue how the process went. We would program in the results, and they would be wrong. Then she would call another meeting with the same people to discuss the errors. Her method of problem solving was to never trust anybody. She was constantly asking one person what another person was doing.
The implementation of the process designer calls for a early success, a project understood by everybody which can be implemented quickly (in around a month or two) to foster the growth of knowledge of the tool and to help the end users understand the value and design of the program. Our method of working was to take forever to incorrectly implement a process which nobody understood. It was a colloseal failure right from the start, and in only a short time the whole project was abandoned.
What was my responsibility in this project? Good question. It's always good to examine failures in that way. My failure was being to timid. I assumed that in a business that size, it was vital not to make a process error in a vital business componant, and my behavior followed the hipocrates, my first goal was not to do any harm. For this reason, when told something by someone with more experience and better slovene than me, I would just accept it. The rules were far to convoluted for me to ever be sure enough about my understanding to rebel outright, so the most I ever did was to ask for a second opinion. Despite working in Organization there were no definitive documents on a single process in the bank.
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