Most annoying/unnecessary task at work?
Mar. 3rd, 2007 09:32 pm![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
the-s-guy.livejournal.com posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
techrecoveryHaving worked for a number of places, I can safely say the current one is the crappiest. And the real sand grains in my gearbox are the sheer number of nontechnical and/or utterly unnecessary tasks we, as technical operators, are expected to do.
This includes, but is not limited to -
* Cut-n-pasting text from email to tickets, without actually addressing the issues
* Having an email-forwarding procedure which consists of several hundred clicks, keystrokes and cut-n-pastes
* Having to manually extract the same keywords from tickets every time any of the multiple thousand staff is hired or leaves the company
* Having to manually process multiply-redundant paperwork several times over every time any of the multiple thousand staff requests a network security group, a standard software package, or any type of hardware
* Having people and teams too lazy to type their own damn tickets send us email saying "Log this up and send it back would you, peons? Chop chop."
Most of these tasks should be fully automated. All of them should be being done by administrative personnel, not techies. Many of them are actually completely and totally unnecessary - I've traced the workflows between teams and they loop back on themselves.
Another example: To have a phone handset replaced onsite, a user calls Group 1, who calls us (Group 2), who calls the company with the contract for that site (Group 3), who sends it back down to Group 1 with an authorisation code, who then allocates it to Group 4 (who is usually Group 1 under a different name), who then replaces the handset maybe a week later.
Don't even ask about replacing a mouse. That's the same procedure, except two additional levels of management, a procurement team and a shipping company get involved as well.
So - have you heard of worse?
This includes, but is not limited to -
* Cut-n-pasting text from email to tickets, without actually addressing the issues
* Having an email-forwarding procedure which consists of several hundred clicks, keystrokes and cut-n-pastes
* Having to manually extract the same keywords from tickets every time any of the multiple thousand staff is hired or leaves the company
* Having to manually process multiply-redundant paperwork several times over every time any of the multiple thousand staff requests a network security group, a standard software package, or any type of hardware
* Having people and teams too lazy to type their own damn tickets send us email saying "Log this up and send it back would you, peons? Chop chop."
Most of these tasks should be fully automated. All of them should be being done by administrative personnel, not techies. Many of them are actually completely and totally unnecessary - I've traced the workflows between teams and they loop back on themselves.
Another example: To have a phone handset replaced onsite, a user calls Group 1, who calls us (Group 2), who calls the company with the contract for that site (Group 3), who sends it back down to Group 1 with an authorisation code, who then allocates it to Group 4 (who is usually Group 1 under a different name), who then replaces the handset maybe a week later.
Don't even ask about replacing a mouse. That's the same procedure, except two additional levels of management, a procurement team and a shipping company get involved as well.
So - have you heard of worse?
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