the Monday Musings column from that consultant bloke

In 1987 I bought my first PC, an Amstrad purchased from Dixons and with it a dot matrix printer. My children were ten and six and I wanted to, at least, get them used to a PC. I quickly found that we did not have enough memory and so a Western Digital hard drive was fitted and so began a decade or more of upgrading computers. It also got me back into programming because the proprietary software always had so much overhead and writing a BASIC routine that did just what I wanted and no more was far more economical on working memory. It also got me back into hands-on computing.

At work the following year I was interviewed for the job my old boss had vacated and was appointed. My appointment start date would be April 1^st 1989. I should have realised the significance of that, especially knowing well who it was that I would be replacing. I had shared with my old boss my old user software testing plan to help him with the system that I would now be inheriting, but it turned out that he had ignored it. We went live on the Monday morning at eight and by ten we had ground to a halt.

Things were compounded by the stock take that had gone on over the previous weekend and the initial valuation, after inputting the figures, showed us to be £M22 overstocked. With my boss in hiding and the MD on the warpath I had the Berkshire Belle hunting the cock-up whilst I tried to get us working again.

The computer problem was a simple one: There had been no soak test of the system with all types of user running on it at once. Instead, each module had been tested in isolation and each worked fine. The trouble was that as soon as someone accessed an item’s record the system locked that item. If a buyer opened the record for item 4567889 Goggle Sprocket, left-handed, no other part of the system could use that record, so if someone ‘phoned in to order one, the person who took the call could not process the order. If One of the warehouse teams wanted to print a picking list that had that item on it, they couldn’t, and nor could they confirm that they had picked it for another order. Any activity regarding that item was barred across the entire system until the buyer closed the record, and they had probably gone off to make a cup of tea. It didn’t matter who was on the system or what record they were looking up, no-one else could use it.

It was an idiotic piece of programming, based on a requirement that should never have been allowed to be written into the spec, but there it was. Faced with a system that we could not use, my IT friends, and I use the expression with a shovelful of irony, told us that we had agreed that there would be no system upgrades for three months. I told them that if there was no sign of an upgrade for me to test by close of play the following day, I would re-write the thing myself. For the immediate problem I took away access to the system for everyone except a select few and, by mid-afternoon, we were trying to catch up by entering all of the transactions that we had had to log manually. It had all been a bit too macho, with all the testosterone flowing, but I was really pissed that my new team had been misled and let down so badly by people who should have done better: I felt entitled to a rant and enjoyed it so much that I began to incorporate it into my repertoire. Just for special occasions your understand.

The solution took a week to re-programme after I had taken a day to re-design the way it needed to work and issue a specification accordingly. It was a baptism of fire, but there is a great deal of pleasure in firefighting. It is now way to run a business, but, boy, is it fun. The adrenalin rush is a serious high and I was loving being back in a hands-on environment again. Oh, and we found the £M22 too, thanks to the Berkshire Belle and her pal in Finance.

Out of nowhere I had found new motivation, and, despite a horrid home life, I had found a reason to carry on. Any thoughts of ending it all dissipated through that Summer of 1989, but I needed to end my marriage and took legal advice on the subject. The Berkshire Belle and I had become friends as well as colleagues as we got to know each other better and were spending a lot of time together at work as well as travelling on business together. Things were purely platonic though.

The computer system was running, but it suffered from the problem that I talked about a couple of episodes ago in that it had been nearly five years from feasibility study to go-live. A lot had changed along the way and the initial scope had been too limited. We stocked around 26,000 products on a regular basis, but the system would only give us a stock total for each line. With three warehouses to spread our stock around we were still using manual records so that we knew where everything was. For example, we might have 56 pallets of one line, but they could not all be in the same place. We needed to know where each on was and be able to track stock as moved around the site.

We also had a clapped-out fleet of fork lift trucks and a lot of redundant conveyor systems, and so I put together a five year plan with an outline of how it would be financed. That all got through the corporate capital planning round in the August and we were good to go to start doing something better for the troops.

More to come next week.