Hello everybody. I have been reading this site for a few months now and this is the first time I'm posting.
This is a story some, maybe even most, of you can relate to.
In Israel, it being a rather small country in terms of space (yet huge in world media attention), the electric company, henceforth referred to as IEC, is still government-controlled. That means that even though several reforms have been implemented, as a whole it is a huge and sluggish beast, and its IT guys especially don't seem to follow any known procedure, unless it's called: "Wait, I have to call department X to do this."
I work for a small company who has, amazingly enough, won a large contract to implement an interface between the call-center and the technician's scheduling mechanism (I'm not calling it a program on purpose). During the course of trying to implement our solution, we have experienced everything from "Who the heck are you?" to a complete about-turn of the requirements. The whole place is run by worker's unions. I have even noticed that some of the bigger big-wigs don't even know what their job-title is.
The latest WTF we have to face is this:
After finally having managed to test and debug the data streaming back and forth part (please excuse my English) from our app to their mainframe app (and I freely admit that some bugs were caused (and later fixed) by me personally), we have reached the point where all of us are ready to begin testing with real users, on IEC's testing domain.
Having already installed our app on several computers, I thought we were all set and only needed to call in the users, sit them down, and let them comment on how bad and totaly against their normal working process our solution is (And these are my nicer expectations). Of course, first we needed another department to check that everything is in place.
I followed Big Z, as I'll call him, to the basement of the building, where the department dealing with the Citrix (ouch) environment, which encompasses all systems in IEC, is based (good positioning, I say). Big Z sits down at his station and asks where the database is located. The answer he got almost knocked me off my chair.
Apparently, we have been operating and testing in the PRODUCTION environment the whole time!!! Sweat starting to pour, thinking of what I might have done to their mainframe with my bungling code, I ask: "Well, can't we just call the DB department" (having gotten a hang of the process) " and tell them to move it to the test environment?"
"OK, I'll get right on it," Big Z said. And he did. He told someone else, from a different department, that this needs to be done.
A month later, I call in to check what the latest news about The Big Move is. Answer: "Well, the DB department guys decided they need a special authorization to move the database." From production to test.
Now I will probably have to wait till after the holidays (another month at least) for the DB department guys to get the proper authorization from the proper department. Oh, the fun of working alongside Big Government Companies.
I just need to point out that there are several really good and efficient IT people there, who opted for job security rather than good practices and less bureaucracy.