Reply to post: Penny saving

The biggest British Airways IT meltdown WTF: 200 systems in the critical path?

Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward

Penny saving

I have seen, and suffered, this stupid idea of adding systems to the critical path.

I was the Project Leader of a reporting system (among others, I was working for the outsourcing company).

The client wanted to interconnect two systems on the cheap.. and hey, they had the data there.. so they could just make a few custom reports... in a couple of years, the system was providing critical data for billing two different types of projects plus giving data to the regulator.

Of course, as they had to "save money", a "low value" system as this old reporting one got no money. So little they got that I had to fix it myself, on production, several times, being the external project leader, and potentially changing billing data and data being sent to the regulator.

Soon after I left, the system broke for more than two months.. years of neglect and technical debt had their toll.

Note: not even almost free upgrades in base SW were done as the client somehow expected us to assure (as in assure with money) that everything would work afterwards.

The PHBs that made all those brilliant decisions got rises, etc.

Not being able to bill some services, well, that is for the poor sod that inherited the job to explain.

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