Re: mass change of hyperlinks in Excel

["sjl" <sjl_abc@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dan -

I have great sympathy for your situation.

I am currently working for a global pharmaceutical company that has a 
seemingly rigorous methodology for implementing changes, largely due to the 
United States Food and Drug Administration requirement that systems be 
'Validated'.  Not all of our systems are Validated, but that is about to 
change.  Pretty soon all systems here will need Validation.

FDA Validation is very time-consuming process.  Any time that a Validated 
system is changed, the entire system must be re-tested.  This makes our 
users less apt to want changes in the first place.

To make a simple program change (one line of code, for example) requires 
that:

1) A Functional Specification that is at least three pages long must be 
written (usually by a non-technical business analyst), defining the request 
for change and giving the business reasons for making the change.  The last 
page of the Functional Specification has the 'test script' for testing the 
change, which usually consists of something like 'Enter an order' with the 
Desired Result being 'Did it look Ok?'.

2) The Functional Spec must go through a ROI review by management (technical 
people are not usually involved in this step either, so at this point they 
don't even have clue as to how much time will be required of the BA, 
programmer, and user).

3) A technical person (usually the programmer to whom the project is 
assigned, once the ROI is deemed to be worthy) then reviews the Functional 
Specification and writes a Technical Specification, detailing the 
programming and setup changes required to implement the request.  At this 
step, we usually determine that the Functional Specification was not very 
"functional".  It then takes a slew of emails to ascertain what the user 
/really/ wanted.

4) Once all of the requirements are gathered, the programmer does the 
programming, usually under orders to not communicate with the end user or 
business analyst except through one of the 'lead developers', who haven't 
done any programming in over five years.

5) Once the programming is completed, the programmer writes an 'As 
Delivered' document, which documents what he /really/ did to implement the 
requested change/enhancement.  This document is usually longer than either 
the Functional or Technical specs, due to all of the additional requirements 
that were gathered during the programming phase.

6) The changes are then promoted to the QA environment for testing by a 
business analyst.  It sometimes takes /months/ for them to get it tested, 
and once they find a problem and reject it, the programmer has to 
re-acquaint himself with the project to make the requested changes to fix 
the problems found during testing.


On the other hand, I don't believe that the "super-users" who use 
spreadsheets are required to follow the same methodology described above.


My rule of thumb for estimating how long to do programming on a project is 
now:

1)  Estimate how long you /think/ it should take
2)  Double it
3)  Change the unit of measure to the next highest one


Thus, if I think it should really take /one hour/, I estimate it at /two 
days/


By the way, my department recently got a new manager, and he has a new 
director.  Neither of them know anything about the System i or the 
application software we use.  My boss is now training /them/.  She has to 
prepare some new kind of report every week.  I asked her recently if she had 
ever seen the movie 'Office Space'.  She had not, but rented it and watched 
it a couple of weeks ago with her kids.

They asked her if working here was anything like the movie, and I believe 
she told them 'Worse!'.

Bottom line:
I don't think I would describe this as an "Agile" company!

- sjl


Dan wrote:
  Dilbertesque, perhaps?
  The lawyers rule at this company. That said, I am not aware
  of any pointy-haired bosses in my general vicinity.
  In fact, my manager is, by far, one of the best I've ever had in my 
career.
  I am usually quite cynical on this topic,
  given my career experience, but there seems to be a genuine
  concern for associates' longetivity in this company.

  The fact is, I've always been happier and more productive
  in companies when the CEO is down the hall from my cubicle.
  Taking the job at this 50,000 employee corporation
  three years ago was something I weighed very carefully,
  even though I'd been laid off for several weeks when I got the offer.
  I'm generally happy here, but not nearly as productive as I could be.