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How to discuss this without being inappropriately specific .. hmm.
There's a department here at the school that does some financial reconciliation with a state agency. The amount of money our system says we spend needs to match the amount of money their system says we spent. The old method of doing this reconciliation was to download the state agency info in a spreadsheet, dump our info in a spreadsheet, and (I'm not kidding) load up the spreadsheets side by side on your screen and scroll down slowly, noting where they differed.
This was a process ripe for improvement.
For a while now, I have been doing the comparison for them - I load the state data in our database, run some scripts I concocted, and email them the differential output. Instant comparison. No fuss, no muss. So, this past week, I turned that process into an automated job. They download the file from the state, rename it and convert it to CSV by opening it in Excel and using 'Save As', and then run this process in our system. The output files I had been emailing them are now instantly at their fingertips.
So what feedback do I get for reducing their effort by 95 percent?
"Too many steps," writes one stakeholder. Apparently, I was supposed to build a robot to do the process for them while giving them a back massage.
Another asks me a series of questions about the process - all of which are clearly answered in the detailed instructions I sent to them. Not that the instructions were lengthy, mind you - it is an absurdly simple process. She just.. didn't read them.
Users suck.
There's a department here at the school that does some financial reconciliation with a state agency. The amount of money our system says we spend needs to match the amount of money their system says we spent. The old method of doing this reconciliation was to download the state agency info in a spreadsheet, dump our info in a spreadsheet, and (I'm not kidding) load up the spreadsheets side by side on your screen and scroll down slowly, noting where they differed.
This was a process ripe for improvement.
For a while now, I have been doing the comparison for them - I load the state data in our database, run some scripts I concocted, and email them the differential output. Instant comparison. No fuss, no muss. So, this past week, I turned that process into an automated job. They download the file from the state, rename it and convert it to CSV by opening it in Excel and using 'Save As', and then run this process in our system. The output files I had been emailing them are now instantly at their fingertips.
So what feedback do I get for reducing their effort by 95 percent?
"Too many steps," writes one stakeholder. Apparently, I was supposed to build a robot to do the process for them while giving them a back massage.
Another asks me a series of questions about the process - all of which are clearly answered in the detailed instructions I sent to them. Not that the instructions were lengthy, mind you - it is an absurdly simple process. She just.. didn't read them.
Users suck.
