I was tagged by Grant to participate in a little quiz that Chris Shaw thought up. Describe two mistakes that I made involving IT…
1) The nagging feeling of something not being right
The first major mistake occurred during one of the first projects that I did from scratch after university. I was working for a small software house that specialised (at the time) in small MS Access apps. When I say small, I’m talking 5-10 users or single user desktop apps. It’s the kind of thing that Access is quite good at.
I was writing a budgetting app for a large insurance company. They wanted to be able to send something out to all of the branch managers, all of the regional managers and all of the provincial managers, so that they could capture their budget info for the next year. The main restriction that I had was that the app must not need to connect to the head office. The managers should be able to copy the app onto laptops and work from home with no internet/WAN access of any form (this was 1999). In addition, the various branch/regional/provincial offices must only have the budget data for themselves and any subsidiary offices.
So I created a second mdb file to be a template data file. It had only the budget line item data (stationary, rent, furniture, etc), copied from the main data file, but none of the offices’ actual budget values. Then, I wrote some rather complex DAO/VBA code that would create one mdb file per office by making a copy of the tempate database (because DAO doesn’t allow a file that’s in use to be copied), insert that office’s data into it, and then place that data file in a specific location so that it could be copied down to the branches.
I tested and I tested and the procedure worked perfectly. Finally the insurance company’s IT people called and said they’d finished making the required changes to the budget line items and percentages for the year and could I go in and babysit the process, since it was the first time. No problem! I went in, ran the process, checked that all the files were there (they were) and then went home. (Anyone see the mistake yet?)
All the way home I had a strange feeling that something was wrong, but I couldn’t place it.
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