Mary was excited about her new project, it involved satellite communications, the new ANSI standard X.94.8, and a new computer based on quantum mechanics that could be in three different states at once. A month had passed since she finished the detail design for The Project and, although she still followed its progress, it had the feeling of a child that had grown up, moved away from home, and become successful. When Joe the programmer called, she was pleased to hear from him.
"Joe, good to hear from you. How's the project going?"
"Pretty good, but I ran into a woman named Mable from the unit and I've got a few questions for you. For instance, how are we supposed to handle credit returns in this system?"
"Credit returns?" Mary asks. A strange numb feeling begins to pass over her when she realizes that she has absolutely no idea what a credit return is.
"Yeah, you know, those blue cards that come back from accounting when the customer fails his credit check. We have to get that information into the system somehow. We even automated the pink sheet they used to staple them to."
"Ok, I'll get right on it," says Mary weakly. "Any other problems?"
"Well, I'm a little worried that we didn't buy enough disk. That requirement for seven years of online storage is going to eat our lunch."
"Seven years?"
"Sure, to replace what they save now in that wall full of filing cabinets in the back of the room," says Joe, oblivious to Mary's discomfort. "And another thing, Mabel is wondering how the new system will enter the production forecasts into the MIS system on the mainframe. She does it once a day now from that old mainframe terminal in the corner."
With some trepidation, Mary went to her new boss and explained that she has to go back to her previous project and "fix a few bugs." He wasn't happy, but she finally convinced him that she could get these little problems out of the way in her spare time and work a little overtime and the new project would stay right on schedule.
Mary and Joe stepped off the elevator on the production floor. Mary felt as nervous as she did the first time she was there. The first person they ran into was Mabel.
"Hey, Mabel," Joe said, "Got a few minutes? Do you know Mary? She did the design for the system."
Mabel was a collection of means and mediums and averages, of indeterminate age, but not young, dressed more for comfort than style, yet not frumpy. Her hair, a light brown, looked a bit odd and Mary couldn't figure out why for a moment, then she realized that it was probably the color she was born with, not frosted, streaked, tinted, highlighted, lowlighted, or tipped. The one area where Mabel was way above average was an open gaze and a friendly smile.
"I saw you walking through the unit a couple of times," said Mabel. "I thought I'd get to talk to you but you always zipped right into Bill's office before I had a chance."
Mary took that as a comment on her analysis skills, but a quick peek at Mabel's smile showed her that it wasn't intended that way. It was just her guilt feelings bubbling up to the surface. She knew that she should have talked with Mabel, but somehow there was never time.
Joe, oblivious as always to these little social interactions, forged ahead. "We'd like to ask you a few questions about those production forecasts. Is this the terminal you use?" he asked with a hand on a darkened 3270 terminal that looked like it had been through a war. Joe suppressed an impulse to look for bullet holes in the side.
"Yes, that's it. It's been in the unit longer than I have. Let me show you how it works."
Mabel felt around the back of the terminal, clicked a switch, and the screen expanded from a lighted dot in the center like an old television set.
"I just log on to the mainframe every evening and enter our day's activity on this one screen, and then..."
Mary spent the day moving from desk to desk in the unit. She re-met Blanche, and met several other people in the unit that she had never talked with before. Each of them had some little job that wasn't part of the system design that performed some little function without which the system couldn't operate.
Most of the staff left at 5:00 and, much to Mary's surprise, one person arrived. He identified himself as Phil, the second shift operator. Second shift! Why hadn't anyone mentioned that there was a second shift! Phil turned out to be a college student who went to school during the day and worked as a second shift operator to help make expenses. He was happy to have someone to talk to, and explained his job to her in detail. Mostly it consisted of dumping the Unix system production data files to tape and storing them away in the tape rack over in the corner.
Back at her desk, Mary was so upset she was worried that the lasagna with four cheeses that she had for lunch was going to reappear. Why hadn't she investigated that old 3270 terminal in the corner? She passed by it every time she walked through the unit to Bill's office. How could she never have wondered what was in all of those filing cabinets? The new system really should have a mainframe interface but she couldn't go back and put one in the design at this late date. The programmers have already started coding and besides, how would that look on her next performance review? Maybe some listings would do the job. Mabel could use the listing and the old terminal and do the same job she'd always been doing. Maybe she could do the same thing with the credit returns, but there was no way out of that extra disk requirement -- she'd have to tell Susan about it.
Joe was annoyed by these changes. The listings weren't so bad, but incorporating two little data files that came from the mainframe into the new system was a bit of a pain. Actually, Joe had been puzzled about some of the data elements that were part of the mainframe files. They were in the database and he was displaying them on various screens, but they never seemed to be entered anywhere. Still, a new mainframe interface was a big job.
"I wish you'd found out about this sooner, Mary," said Joe petulantly. "It's tough to stick a whole new interface into the code at this stage."
"Sorry about that," said Mary with some embarrassment. "You know how it is. They're such small files they just forgot to mention them."
Joe didn't think that he did know "how it is", but there was no point in talking about it now. "Exactly how small are those files?" he asked.
"One of them is about twenty-five items a day and the other is seventy-five, so about a hundred all together."
"How about just entering them manually?" Joe asked. "I could come up with a data capture screen pretty quickly."
"But that's worse than they have now," Mary wailed. "They'd have the same listing from the mainframe that they get now, and an extra step for data entry."
"Well, they can probably enter one a minute, so it's not even two hours a day, and if we don't do it this way we'll miss our target date."
Mary thinks about updating her design document to match the new, more complex system, but her boss is anxious for her to get back to her new project. She promises herself that she'll go back and update it as soon as she gets a chance.
Missing something during the design phase is normal. Look at it this way. The business unit has been creating its manual and semi-automated systems for years -- maybe decades -- and the analyst who's supposed to design the new system has only a month or so to follow all the data paths, chart all of it, find out where all the bodies are buried and why they're dead, and finally, roll it all into a new system. Perhaps Mary's oversights were more significant than most, but still, the real issue isn't finding everything during analysis, it's how you deal with the things you missed when they finally make their appearance.
When Mary went to her new analysis job, she could have made things easier for herself if she'd told her new boss that, for a while, like the qbits in her new quantum computer, she was going to have to be in two different states at the same time, working on the new system but on call for the old. Most of the time there isn't a problem with her doing that -- the new system is in an early stage, the deadlines seem far away, and the new project thinks it can spare the time. Mary really only needs to be concerned with this if she were being transferred to another city or moved to a super-hot project that couldn't spare her for a moment.
The mistake that Mary and Joe made here was to try and deal with the oversights by themselves. Doing that effectively cuts a lot of people out of the decision process that may have important contributions to make. If Bill, the unit manager, had been informed that the new system needed a mainframe interface, he might have decided to use the kind of work-arounds that Mary and Joe came up with, or he might have decided that the mainframe interface was important enough to extend the deadlines and try to squeeze a little more money out of his management to pay for it. When Mary and Joe make these decisions themselves, it effectively disenfranchises Bill.
Regarding updating the design document, if you were to make a list of the data processing pronouncements that are often said but never happen, the number one item on the list would be, "I'll go back and document it later." Mary's design document was always a bit skimpy and it was hard to access since she didn't put it on the same system that held the software, but now it's taken the final step and become inaccurate and misleading. Mary will probably find it years later when she's cleaning out files on her personal PC. She'll feel a brief wave of nostalgia as she reads it, and then she'll hit the delete key.