Group Efforts 21

Group Efforts
The Diary of a Workgroup Manager

Episode 58 (1999)

Amrat has a free tea, Danny has a close shave, Llewellyn has a guilty secret and Costello has a tough decision to make.

Monday 5th
Spring is finally in the air, our IBMs are finally back on our desks and - most amazing of all - the Project Resources Super-App is finally live and kicking. Things aren't, however, so rosy over in I.T. It seems that Llewellyn, desperate to justify his precious leased link, had our company Intranet server surreptitiously transferred to a UNIX box at Smithsons in Glasgow, and with Smithsons now sold we've precisely one week to find it a new home. Amrat, meanwhile, is claiming to have a plan that'll save Llewellyn's bacon. This initially resulted in him being hauled before an All Stars Unethical Activities tribunal, but when he explained that he'd forced Llewellyn to reinstate his sub-departmental management role in return for getting him off the hook, we awarded him a Free Tea for initiative instead. That lad is showing real potential.

Thursday 8th
With Cathy now effectively full-time Purchasing Manager, we're a Planning Exec short (something the Broadleys Reorganisation Juveniles evidently overlooked). We meet Costello to discuss the situation, and find Llewellyn unexpectedly there. He says he has the answer - something called Visio, which lets you draw plans using 'smart objects'. These look like ordinary symbols, but also hold data which other programs can use for things like cost calculations. Llewellyn says that Visio will enable Danny to do the work of two people, to which Cathy replies that a fourfold increase in Danny's output is an over-ambitious target. Llewellyn fails to get the joke, but Costello smiles and suggests we try it anyway. With little else on offer, a test project is agreed.

Wednesday 14th
The Intranet Server Fiasco gets better by the day. Apparently Amrat got a test system running in the Lubyanka, which Llewellyn signed off with the eagerness of a drowning man grasping a cartload of straws. Only after Llewellyn had shown 'his' solution to Costello did he discover that it was based on something called Linux, a freeware version of UNIX a few light-years beyond the pale of Broadleys' Approved Products list. He planned to quietly convert it to NT, but its performance is so good that he daren't disturb it, and Chapman now wants to talk to him about achieving similar improvements at corporate HQ. Llewellyn is currently said to be in a 'delicate emotional state', while Amrat is grinning like a cat and has the sign-off docket safely under lock and key.

Tuesday 20th
Danny has had his Visio familiarisation course, and is ready to start configuring custom objects. His first creation is labelled 'Joan Davies', and announces that its backside is too big to fit whenever anyone attempts to place it inside a room with a floor area of less than 50 square metres. Joan gets wind of this and storms in to disembowel him, but Rose, June and Sheila form a human shield, stating that they have sole rights on dismembering Danny, and that Joan should pick on someone her own size, or alternatively two people of normal human proportions. Fearing a thermonuclear incident, I call Cathy, who calms Joan down and leads her away, deftly shutting the door on Danny's suggestion that she should be checked for BSE. Visio has certainly increased Danny's effectiveness, though not in the way I'd hoped.

Wednesday 28th
The PR Super-App has thrown up its first major in-service bug. This morning Rose made three materials allocations to Reading B, and when she tried to pull one back, it wouldn't budge. The supplier is due a just-in-time automated order at 5pm, and by 2pm Amrat, Cathy, Bob and Llewellyn are crowded round Rose's screen, the latter studiously ignoring Danny's cries of 'try it under Linux'. By 3pm there's talk of abandoning the order run, which causes Costello to appear at 3.30. He suggests re-entering the day's transactions, but the looks on Rose and June's faces quickly change his mind. At 4pm Bob thinks he's solved it, but by 4.30 it's clear that he hasn't, and at 4.50 Costello authorises the order run cancellation. At 5.05 Sheila's phone rings. It's Brison, ordering Costello and Llewellyn to report upstairs immediately. The buck has stopped, and its guardians go to meet their fate.