Third Time’s a Charm

Or so the saying goes.

For a couple of years, I’ve been asked to help create a program to automate the gathering of data from a different system and roll it into our current system and each time the effort got bogged down in the corporate blackhole.

I always got stuck at the point where I needed to know which dataset to use when I try to do this project but when I asked for help in determining which reports to use, it’s been “Oh, let’s have a meeting” and then in the meeting the guy who ran the other department would say, “Hey our system can do this.”

Well, yeah, your system probably could do it, but do you have the time to include this request? The project always died in that department. Never could get past that guy.

Sometimes a project is just not ready to go, usually because the people are not really invested in it and are not willing to change yet. And this project was one of them. I didn’t really have any leverage on the other department and I didn’t sense a strong desire in my department. The timing wasn’t right.

It was just a blackhole every time I went down this path.

A couple of weeks ago, I was asked again to do this automation, and I was like, “Here we go again.” This time I swore I was not going to get caught in some meeting; I was just going to use whatever report I think was right and then just force the person to say “yea” or “nay”. I was just done with being nice. Fortunately, this time my contact actually knows both my system and the other system we want to incorporate, so she was way more helpful. She actually pinpointed where to go.

So, this project, finally, it’s moving and very close to being done.

OMG, I can’t believe it’s finally progressing.