Mary stepped out of the elevator on the Production floor. She didn't exactly have that "back home again" feeling, but she wasn't as scared as she was the first time. At least she knew Bill and Judy now. Before, she had just sailed into Bill's office with hardly a glance at the operations area. Now she stopped to take a closer look.
Order exists in the unit. There are rows of desks, an entire wall of filing cabinets, and one desk where a large Rolodex is the most prominent object. A rack of mag tapes nestles into a far corner. The most peculiar item in the unit is a conveyor belt customized to move paper files. It almost completely circles the area; file folders whiz along it until they run into little rubber roadblocks conveniently placed by work areas. A dark computer terminal sits on a small desk in the corner with no chair in front of it.
With this order as a background, the people seem to move like ants following invisible scent trails. A man works with what appears to be a complex adding machine, and occasionally makes an entry on the stack of paper in front of him. A woman stamps papers with a rubber stamp like a jaded, Las Vegas slot machine player going through her stack of quarters. Mary sees a man place a file folder on the paper conveyor belt where it zips off down the line. He then removes a new folder that has conveniently stopped by his desk. Another man staples a blue card to a pink sheet of paper and adds it to a folder in front of him.
Mary is a bit disturbed by the fact that she doesn't know what any of these people are doing. She knows, of course, what the unit as a whole does, and she assumes that all of these seemingly meaningless activities must relate to that somehow, but how?
That uneasy thought vanishes away as Bill comes up. "So we got the approvals!," he says. "Now we can get down to some serious work."
Bill leads her on the now familiar walk through the unit to the big conference room where Judy is waiting. They each have a copy of the Business Systems Design, and over the next few weeks they review each item on the design and expand it into its component parts.
Over the next few weeks Mary completes her first draft of the Detail Design. She reviews it extensively with the Bill and Judy. They love it. It's diagrammed, it's documented, it's top-down, it uses a LAN that runs through the electrical power lines, it's beautiful!
Mary meets a woman from the operations area when she asks a question that Bill and Judy can't answer. "You know this arrow for the customer file just goes right off the page," she says, pointing to a diagram, "Where does that data come from?"
"Hmm . . . now where does that data come from?", Bill says with a perplexed look. He motions to Judy, "See if Blanche can come in for a minute."
Mary is surprised that there are questions that the Bill and Judy can't answer. She thought they knew everything about the operation, but something good happens when Blanche, from the over-the-counter window, comes in. "Oh sure," she says, "that's the AUTHCUST file that we get from Joe over in the computer center every morning. You know, he's the little guy who wears the red clip-on tie. I think he's married to Joan from Customer Service..."
Bill jumps in to staunch this flow of information, "Thanks, Blanche. That's exactly what we were looking for. You've been a big help, as always." Bill escorted Blanche to the door.
"Anything else I can do for you?" says Blanche.
"No, I don't think so," says Bill, "But we'll stop over later if we have any more questions."
Mary quickly includes the AUTHCUST file in her design. It disturbs the perfect symmetry of the system to have to include this tiny, outside data source, but she is pleased that she uncovered this obscure point before coding started.
Finally, the detail design is finished and Mary turns it over to Susan. She briefly considered uploading it from her PC to the mainframe where the programmers could look at it directly, but that would have meant leaving out all the flowcharts and clip art. "That's why we have copiers," she thought. "If they want any changes, I'll just do them on my PC and print out a new copy."
In Mary's defense, we gave her the toughest analysis job there is -- creating the first computer system for a mostly non-automated business unit. Most analysis jobs are along the lines of adding a garage or a room addition to an already existing house. There's a big difference between that and being confronted with a vacant lot and a vague plan.
Still, she could have done better.
Mary should have talked to every person on the floor. She should have asked them what they like about their job, what they don't like about it, what's the busiest time of the day/month/year, what they do every day, what they do once a month, what they do once a quarter, what they do at year-end, what they do in the morning, what they do in the evening, and especially, what they do with every piece of paper, every file, and every report with which they come into contact. If she had talked to Mabel and asked her those questions, she'd have found out about the data she entered into the MIS system. If she had talked to the guy stapling the blue card to the pink sheet of paper, she not only would have found out what each document was, but by the time she finished tracking them around the floor, she'd have ended up knowing more about them than the stapler himself.
She was close to being on the right track when she talked to Blanche. Every operation has a Blanche. She's been with the company for 25 years, in the same department for the last 15. She's drastically underpaid but doesn't really have any interest in promotions. She just likes to come in to work every day, do her job, gab with her friends, and she knows everything about the operation! As an analyst, if you can just locate a Blanche, your job becomes easier by orders of magnitude. She could have told Mary, not only where the customer file came from and the name of the guy who sent it to her, but how many kids he has, and a little gossip about him and one of the secretaries that happened five years ago. Mary should have seized Blanche in a grip of steel. She should have taken her out to lunch, had coffee with her, commiserated with her on the low quality of the people they were hiring these days, and let her talk about her favorite topic, all the problems they've had in the unit over the years. This stuff is gold and jewels to an analyst!
"Then there was that time the disk crashed and we had to enter all the orders by hand. I thought Bill was going to have kittens that day! We lost all the rate tables and for the rest of the day we were just guessing at the prices to charge. That's why I keep a list of them in the bottom drawer of my desk now."
Even if Mary didn't initially realize Blanche's value, large groups of neurons in her skull should be lighting up and starting to strobe by now. She should be taking furious notes and ordering a refill on Blanche's coffee. Gathering information is the toughest part about being an analyst. You're in a situation where you don't know what to ask because you don't understand the business, and they don't know what to tell you, both because they don't understand data processing and because they think the things they do in their job are just so utterly obvious that they don't require comment. To do a good job, you have to hang around, talk to people, and even make a pest of yourself. Here's the kind of conversation that will tell you you're doing a good job.
"Why does this purchase order look different from that one?"
"You are new at this, aren't you? This is our triple bypass purchase order that goes straight to final processing."
"Really! You mean it bypasses the signature verification check, the credit check, and the insufficient funds check."
"No, I mean that if you don't go away and stop bothering me I'm going to have a heart attack!"
Mary should also have followed the data around the floor and to other units. Amazing things happen when you do that. At one installation, a massive, nightly update run populated a massive database with sales details for the entire company. It turned out that the database was only used by one department and when we asked them what they did with it, the answer was, "Well, we don't really need all those details, we just need the dollar totals by sales region." Needless to say, the database soon became much less massive. In another case, a three-hour computer run produced a report consisting of a single sheet of paper as its output. When the supposed user was found, he said he didn't need it anymore. "Why didn't you tell us you didn't need it," we asked with some frustration? "What's the big deal?", he said. "It's only one sheet of paper!"
Perhaps Mary wouldn't have uncovered anything so dramatic by following the data, but she would have found out that a lot of it ended up in the wall full of filing cabinets, and that it stayed there for a long time.
Should Mary have listened to the business manager? Of course she should have. The business manager has the vision. He has the idea of how the whole system should be structured; the other people in the unit will likely just zero in on their own jobs. But there are two dangers: first, that you listen to only the business manager, and second, that you don't talk to him at all. Of course he sounds like he knows everything about the unit -- that's why they made him the manager -- but if he took the time to learn the jobs of everyone in his unit, he wouldn't have time for all those visions of the future -- or to do proper maintenance on those patent leather Guccis. To do a good analysis job, you have to take both the high road and the low road. The business manager will give you the general direction, but the devil is in the details and you'll get those from the other people in the unit.
At least Mary produced some useful documentation on the system. Well, actually, no. Beginning with a flowchart was the right idea, but she should have started by flowcharting the existing system, not the new one. The process of converting an old system to a new one is one of transformation, not creation. Remember that paper conveyor belt that hustled forms around the floor? Doesn't that sound like a primitive LAN? And everywhere those paper files ran into a little rubber stopper is a candidate for a PC and a screen program. Mary certainly doesn't have to and shouldn't slavishly reproduce the existing system, but a flow of it would allow her to be sure that her new system incorporated all the functrions of the old one.
Mary also made a mistake in not uploading her final document to the mainframe, even if the mainframe didn't support all the nice graphics and charts that she could do on her PC. Design documents should be the basis for system documentation. They should pass from the analyst, to the programmers, to the testers and QA people, and finally to some Nameless Future Person who wants to know what it's all about. By not passing her document on to the programmers she may have consigned her system to an undocumented state and incur the wrath of that NFP who has the task of making system enhancements.