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Whole village broadband goes every day at 7am

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Cerebus:

--- Quote from: coppice on September 23, 2020, 04:01:30 pm ---
--- Quote from: Cerebus on September 23, 2020, 12:02:02 pm ---Really, what muppets put out a press release to advertise the fact that it took them more than 18 months to recognise, diagnose and track down a simple EMI problem in a tiny village? Here's the massive area that they had to roam to find this fault, and it took over 18 months:

--- End quote ---
At a guess I'd say someone who wanted to embarrass their management into allowing them to use more effective practices.

--- End quote ---

Plausible, but this story started out as an official Openreach press release, i.e. a bit of PR. That is, a million miles away from any of the 'poor bloody infantry' who might have the kind of motivation you ascribe to leak such a story. Which just goes to show that, in general, people in PR are only slightly higher up the evolutionary ladder than people in HR.


--- Quote ---I've been through similar things. We had a line fault that showed up every time there was rain, but had disappeared by the time anyone came to check. The rules the technicians worked under would not allow them to move us to one of the many alternative lines available. After a number of visits a technician asked us to cooperate in the only fix he knew worked. He came, left and we immediately called to complain, regardless of whether the line was working. This repeated every few hours, with him arriving just to tell us to make the next call. It took about THREE WEEKS of this before his work sheet finally told him to change the line.

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When staff have to start devising methods of gaming, or making end-runs around, 'The System' so that they can do their jobs and serve their customers you know that something in 'The System' is deeply broken.

Last year I was on a consulting contract at a large international telco. I kept running into deeply broken processes. Every time I tried to get people to do something to improve or fix the broken processes I kept running into an entrenched "It's BigCo, you can't make anything better" attitude.

The project I was working on had been running for over two years and was still not fully live when I left them to it. It had involved a team of seven people full time directly and dozens indirectly part-time in other departments. My personal estimation was that the whole project was somewhere between six and 12 man-months worth of work if done without the overhead of doing it the "BigCo" way.

I spent the first 2 1/2 months there burning up my fees while basically doing nothing because of issues of getting hold of resources like a company sanctioned laptop, logins and other various access permissions needed, all of which were stalled by useless, inefficient internal processes.  A £50 software license purchase (a firmware feature license for hardware we already had) essential to the project took from December to February to make happen, with almost daily chasing from me. In any company where I've been 'management' that would have gone on someone's credit card, have been done and dusted in 2 hours and reimbursed promptly via expenses. My estimate was that, doing it the BigCo way, that £50 license cost £2,500 - £5,000 to procure (It would have cost even more in lost worktime had not the vendor kindly issued temporary licenses to cover us while the machinery ground along at its own pace). That whole project was easily burning £700k per year, but by my estimate ought to have cost £50k to 100k in total.

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