by Vanessa Lowry with a story from David Greensberg.
It sometimes seems that companies respect the solutions provided by outside consultants more than from their own staff. I love this story where David shares how he created an easy solution for a problem that the company expected to pay big bucks to solve. And, it wasn’t until he had gone out on his own that they fully appreciated the solution. A lesson for me is to be open to answers from whatever source provides them… and it may be easier to ask for forgiveness than permission!
“A while back I worked for a company that utilized a program for displaying exploded parts diagrams on a computer screen at a call center. Customers would call in, want to order a part for something, and the agent would pull up the diagram on the screen and try to figure out what the customer wanted.
This is all back before the advent of the Internet and the WWW.
The program used was designed as a proof-of-concept in another part of the Company, and ended up getting into production use. It suffered from poorly documented code, memory leaks that required daily reboots of the workstations, and worst of all – a code library that wasn’t Y2K compliant. In fact, come 1/1/2000, that program was dead.
The entire business for this division relied on this program working, so the powers-that-be started bringing in the sales guys with their dog ‘n pony shows, the consultants, and everyone they could think of in order to come up with a solution.
As a member of the IT team, I got hauled into meeting after endless boring meeting. Finally several solutions were arrived at – none less than $500,000 for the initial software install, and none of which would suit our needs entirely. All the software required costly ‘customization’. I asked the IT Director what would happen if we didn’t have the Y2K to contend with, and he said ‘we’d keep looking – but we have to do something…’.
I decided that I didn’t want to maintain some half-baked, hacked up off-the-shelf system that we crowbared into the business – so I sat down one weekend and wrote something in PERL that would work with our current infrastructure, work faster than what we had now, would add more functionality, would be well-documented, and wouldn’t suffer from Y2K or memory leaks.
I didn’t ask anyone. I didn’t tell anyone. I simply turned it on and gave it to the Call Center supervisors and leads to try out for the day. By lunch time, the word was out – everyone wanted ‘The Bridge’ (it’s what they named it – it was supposed to bridge the gap over the Y2K).
My IT Director came up to me – said ‘Ummm, what’s ‘The Bridge’? I don’t recall approving anything.’ I told him ‘That’s right – I whipped something up this weekend as a proof-of-concept – figured I’d keep you out of it so you could have deniability in case it didn’t work out so well…’
He smiled and asked me for more info. Liked what he saw and we rolled it out to everyone that day. Training requirements were minimal because I kept the interface super simple.
Because ‘The Bridge’ was faster, we reduced our call times by 3 seconds per call (and with thousands of inbound calls per day that was a lot of seconds), and as a result we needed 18 fewer phone agents to handle the load.
Despite the success, the Company kept looking for a ‘real solution’. I eventually moved on to other positions, and heard after the Y2K that they’d implemented something from another firm. A month or two after that – I got a call ‘Do you happen to have a copy of the source code for ‘The Bridge’? We’re going back to it… what we put in doesn’t work as well…’ I gave them what they needed, even helped re-install it in exchange for a pizza that evening…
Besides the refinement of my programming skills, I learned a great deal – all because I gave myself permission. Could I have been fired? Sure, maybe. But I still wouldn’t have done anything different.”
Thanks David!
Find out more about Vanessa. Find out more about David.
When have you Given Yourself Permission? Let me share it with others! Email me at vlowry at gmail.com.
