Departmental Communications

[jacobine.livejournal.com]

Ahh, the joys of departmental communication.

I assist the security/operations group, in addition to being the lead help desk. This means I do the vast majority of my company's authority changes, terminations and new user creations. Our official security group is three people: the operations manager, the other person in operations and me as assistant.

So today, I'm doing my usual afternoon routine, which is catching up on forms that have been submitted (they're all electronic). I pull up the waiting to be completed list which is long as hell right now due to a variety of things that other people are supposed to take care of but haven't yet. I'm not allowed to do calling cards or generic accounts, and we need a secondary sign-off on any changes to authorities for one software package. I'm momentarily surprised at the big list, most of which I hadn't seen notifications of.

One of the first things I do is the new users. Today, that was someone in Thailand. So I create the user. Get email done. Hit edit on my electronic form, so I can enter the new user id and complete it.

Except the Completed button isn't there. WTF?

I call the web guy in charge of it, who tells me this is the new work flow thing, decided upon by my manager, our director and the network manager. Note, the operations manager is not in this group of decision-makers. I'm surprised, the other guy who works on the forms is surprised (and he's in the web guy's office when I call) and we're both a little pissy about it. Thanks for telling us, really. Thanks a lot.

So now I have to wade through all the forms to find the ones I CAN do (ie, the ones in the States) and we still don't know what that means for the forms that deal with the software that requires the special sign-off and that only the three of us who work operations can change... which is being rolled out worldwide.

My life would be so much easier if they bothered to tell the people who did this stuff about it.

Comments

[teraflops.livejournal.com]

Much sympathy. I just spent the last six hours, along with my manager and another technician, compiling an incident report, all because a senior VP decided to take an interest in this particular issue. We had half a day lead time to prepare a report on an issue that took place over a six month period, in ~10 different tickets, involving pretty much our entire team, and had to prepare a minute by minute play by play of everything that had been done.