all quiet on the office front
It’s eerily quiet in the office – a lot of people took the day off to get a head start on the long weekend. The rest of us suckers are patiently waiting for the clock to advance to the point where we can tactfully slip away.
What have I been doing at work lately? The video-teleconferencing control touchpanel that I redesigned has been rolled out across the company, and the number of support tickets for usage problems has dropped from 1 million to 0 (numbers are approximate). We were able to the design the controller system in such a way that it could be installed or modified in-house, without having to hire external contractors. So that was pretty sweet. Problem is, if you do something well, the work will never stop. Indeed, the same group is now overhauling a more portable video-teleconferencing setup, so I’m given the fun task of squeezing a whole bunch of functions into a remote with a tiny touchscreen.
We rolled out an update to the corporate directory. Among other things, we pushed out a feature that lets users add a custom note to their page. Before the release, managers were seen running in the hallways with their heads on fire, screaming “Think of the children!” – the amount of freedom that we allowed users to have wasn’t really something that anybody has done before. We persevered, and I’ve been tracking usage for the past month. Sure enough, the worst fears of the pessimists have not been realized: people are not using the feature to call each other names or post nuclear launch codes. Instead, the system became a little more malleable – sweet #2.
The portal project has finished the requirements gathering process – apparently, “requirements gathering” involves me typing up every dumb little detail of the project, then handing them over to successive waves of managers that burrow their eyebrows, draw Gantt charts that immediately become obsolete, and have their secretaries compile documents that nobody reads. Luckily, we seem to be past that stage, now doing the same work that we would have been doing if we didn’t go through the useless exercise of etching everything in stone.
The fun never stops around here. Unless the long weekend is coming up, that is.
What have I been doing at work lately? The video-teleconferencing control touchpanel that I redesigned has been rolled out across the company, and the number of support tickets for usage problems has dropped from 1 million to 0 (numbers are approximate). We were able to the design the controller system in such a way that it could be installed or modified in-house, without having to hire external contractors. So that was pretty sweet. Problem is, if you do something well, the work will never stop. Indeed, the same group is now overhauling a more portable video-teleconferencing setup, so I’m given the fun task of squeezing a whole bunch of functions into a remote with a tiny touchscreen.
We rolled out an update to the corporate directory. Among other things, we pushed out a feature that lets users add a custom note to their page. Before the release, managers were seen running in the hallways with their heads on fire, screaming “Think of the children!” – the amount of freedom that we allowed users to have wasn’t really something that anybody has done before. We persevered, and I’ve been tracking usage for the past month. Sure enough, the worst fears of the pessimists have not been realized: people are not using the feature to call each other names or post nuclear launch codes. Instead, the system became a little more malleable – sweet #2.
The portal project has finished the requirements gathering process – apparently, “requirements gathering” involves me typing up every dumb little detail of the project, then handing them over to successive waves of managers that burrow their eyebrows, draw Gantt charts that immediately become obsolete, and have their secretaries compile documents that nobody reads. Luckily, we seem to be past that stage, now doing the same work that we would have been doing if we didn’t go through the useless exercise of etching everything in stone.
The fun never stops around here. Unless the long weekend is coming up, that is.
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