Hello World,

I am a seasoned BA with a large international corporation.  I have a comfortable window cube, make a living wage, and am a pretty darn good BA, if I say so myself.

Lately, however, I have been feeling like Bill Murray's character in Groundhog Day and that has driven me to find this forum.  You see, the company I work for is huge, with dozens of disconnected silos. This silo issue is most prominent when working with IT.  Now, as a BA, working with IT is what I do.  Being a BA and working with/for IT is intrinsically linked, it cannot be escaped. Further, the vast majority both of the technical support and development personnel are contractors in India.

 It is hard to even begin to express how frustrating it is to work with IT at my company.  For this post I will focus on support issues.  When something is broken, I contact IT.  I wait 1-30 days for a response.  The first response is wrong 90% of the time.  I send an explanation as to why they are wrong and request that they review again.  1-30 days passes again and a response comes.  By this point in time, they are around 50% accurate.  If accurate, I count my blessings it only took 2 requests.  If their response is wrong, I again explain why they are wrong and request them to review further.  This cycle continues over and over again until I have an answer as to what the problem is.  Some issues are resolved in a couple days, others take years (yes, years, I still have requests open from 2008).

This is where the Groundhog reference comes into play.   I keep having the same conversation with the same people over again.  The subject may vary slightly from day to day.  Today may be invoicing, tomorrow revenue, and the day after goods movement. But no matter the topic or support person assigned the dance is the same; and it is getting old, frustrating, and boring.

This week I was especially frustrated as IT found the root cause of an issue that has been open for 4 months: IT programmed it wrong.  So, IT found that a legitimate issue was incorrectly programmed.  No worries, we all make mistakes and there is an easy resolution: IT fixes coding error, SIT, UAT, Regression, Go-Live in a couple weeks, right?  Wrong!  IT needs money from my department to fix the IT error.  Further, IT is currently denying all changes due to budget cutbacks.  After all, what is cheaper than a broken and inefficient ERP system? 

I cannot be alone in all this, how do you deal with these types of issues?  Why prevents you from proverbially letting the groundhog drive your truck off a cliff into the bottom of a quarry?