Memo to myself: must attend advanced electronic diary management course, buy wall chart and practise dealing with humiliations and climb-downs.
This follows my efforts to drag the department’s holiday arrangements into the 21st century – attempts which are on the verge of floundering, thanks to my over-ambitious plans and those idiots in IT and their so-called solutions.
I implemented their holiday planning “package”, based on what they told me was tried and trusted technology. Well, trying it and trusting it has proved an IT experience too far.
The objective was simple. I would even go so far as to say it was SMART. The team book their holidays electronically, approval is done via electronic signature and I’m sent a regular electronic report of the current status.
There’s only one problem. Or rather challenge, as the IT boys put it since our IT director banned the word ‘problem’.
“HR,” he told me, “in IT there are no problems, only challenges and solutions.”
Well his overpaid band of T-shirt wearing, heavy metal-loving code monkeys are to solutions what Wayne Rooney is to the Queen’s English – very far removed.
All I wanted was the facility to see the entire team’s holiday arrangements for the year on a single screen: to know who was off and when. I told IT, but they said it wasn’t in the spec, was out of scope and that I would just have to wait.
Maybe, but the system’s inability to provide the big holiday picture, and my slackness with the digital signature facility, means half the staff are due to be off at any given time during the summer period.
Time, I think, for an irretrievable systems crash and a wall-planner.
