Month: August 2016

First off, let me say that I am very grateful to have a job and to be working—even if it is for less money than I was earning ten fifteen years ago.

That being said, working for a government agency these past six months has been an eye opening experience. I have nothing in my work history to compare the level of dysfunction I encounter on a daily basis. Not even DISH was this broken, and that's saying a lot.

You would think that this agency would've learned from the fiasco that was their 3-month new equipment refresh project that was started before Ben and I returned to Phoenix and is just now—more than a year later—wrapping up. Hiring Dell to basically do everything short of placing the new equipment on users' desks wasn't their first mistake. That was failing to get the necessary teams in place to do proper testing of the hardware and software before pushing it out to the thousands of employees across the state. If that sort of infrastructure had been in place, then maybe—just maybe—it wouldn't have been necessary to terminate their contract when Dell failed to live up to the ridiculous expectations and timeline they'd been given…and then turn around and rehire them because it was obvious that without their outside knowledge and assistance the entire project was going to crash and burn in a spectacular fashion.

But no! Get it out, get it out, get it out! NOW NOW NOW.

So six weeks after I came on board and a few hundred Win10 machines had gone out the door, most of those machines started coming back in to be reimaged with Win7. Mission-critical software didn't work properly. Users hated the OS. The CIO "left to pursue other opportunities" and his replacement immediately announced that unless the hardware wouldn't support it or there was an overriding business reason for Win10 to be used, all new hardware that went out was to be loaded with Win7.

I can't tell you how many problems that cleared up—not to mention it cut down our machine prep time by half.

My time here was supposed to have ended when the refresh project wrapped up, but I truly believe my supervisor wants to keep me around long enough to survive the agency's hiring freeze so he can bring me on as a full time employee. (This would be a huge pay increase, bringing me back in line with what I have been making prior to this.) Thankfully for both of us, a new project was coming online—the replacement of around 250 customer-facing kiosk devices across the state; all of which would need to be imaged and prepped for deployment.

And that is where today's rant comes in.

Once again we are being told to get something pushed out the door without adequate Q&A testing being performed—even though we know things are not working properly—because apparently it's more important to show that something is being done rather than wait and make sure what's being done is right.

With one batch of machines already out the door and in the field, the first time I had to unbox a few dozen other already-imaged machines was when the powers that be realized the assigned computer names were too long and couldn't properly join the domain. The second time the machines (which thankfully hadn't gone out yet) were unboxed was because someone realized that from a data security perspective, these very public machines probably shouldn't have their USB ports active. The third time they were unboxed was because someone else realized that the machines needed to have an auto-login to the service account that ran the kiosk software.

The auto-logon worked sporadically at best, and seemed to be tied to the machines being in the proper group in Active Directory. Once they were in the correct bucket in AD, some worked and some still didn't. "Oh, it's a back-end issue they're working on," my supervisor said. "Go ahead and box them up and get them ready to go out."

Against my better judgment, I boxed them up again. My boss returned to the workroom shortly after I'd finished the chore and said, "We need to force group policy again."

I wonder what stupidity tomorrow will bring?