Stories from the Jungle

Some years ago I worked on a project where a huge corporation (my employer) hired another huge corporation to develop a custom desktop application.  There would be about 5,000 users, and the app was built to handle contact, workflow and scheduling information in a client/server environment - typical early 90's stuff.  I was the junior guy, prepping data and helping my boss understand the new "PC" lingo. A couple of hot-shot programmers sat in a room for a month and wrote the application - in Visual Basic 2.0!  I suppose there were a few months of specification and gui design work ahead of this, but I wasn't involved in that work, having recently joined the company.   Anyway, the application was a failure.  We spent several million dollars, but the user community didn't like the app and refused to adopt it.

I believe the reason why is because the users would have had to change their business processes to make the software useful to them - they had to adapt to the app.  Since these were senior people - high achievers and highly trained - adapting to anything just wasn't going to happen.  Did the software fail to meet their needs?  Yes, it did.  But what the designers failed to consider was that it was doomed from the start.  Every user, having worked their way up in the business, had a distinct working style.  The software, in trying to satisfy everyone, satisfied no one.   The huge corporation went on to attempt this project at least two more times that I know of, but the adoption rate never broke 40%.

One funny thing that happened involved a routine that loaded names and addresses from a main-frame data feed.  The names and addresses were all in capital letters, which looked like crap on the application's output.  My boss was asking the consultants to quote the work of modifying the application to convert the ALL CAPS into Proper Case.  The programmers hummed and hawed a bit and then said this particular item would add 3 days to the bill.  These guys were costing $1,500 per day, so that's nine grand!  My boss leaned out his office door and asked me if I thought this was a reasonable estimate.  in the 30 seconds it took him to described the problem to me, I had fired up Excel and written a macro, using Excel's Proper function, to do the job.  "3 days?  Well, actually... just a second... it's done - I just did it with an Excel macro!"  

The consultants gave me a stinky look, but my boss smiled, and told them to skip that item.  I think I got a decent bonus that year.