On Friday I checked in with our contact at IT on what the status is with our project. The news wasn’t exactly what I wanted to hear. As an unofficial word, our Work Request has been submitted and passed through to IT. When a request is initialized to IT, the project is put into a queue, and we seem to be at number 8 in that queue. Unfortunately the projects ahead of us must be completed to get started on our own development process. When I asked when they expect our development process to begin I was told at the earliest, sometime in late September!
So I had to be the bearer of bad news to my manager and everyone else involved with the project. I tried to explain the reasoning behind IT and not just look at this delay as something severely a bad thing. Of course I will be leaving here on August 16th to complete my internship but there has been much progress made already towards development. One of the most tedious jobs was gathering requirements which I accomplished early on. Also determining each user’s current process gave us a better idea on what we actually needed in this issues tracking system and what we can do without. Also developing a requirements document and work request were the final steps on getting the departments attention and get the ball rolling on development.
The worst was out of the way...almost. After the project was brought up and discussed by the HR directors and IT staff, they had a few more questions for me. They really wanted a better business case on why we should be developing the application in Peoplesoft rather than utilizing another available in-house software solution. HR and IT really wanted to explore every option we have before laying down into a set software solution. In my final weeks here I’ll complete the request and finally grab the spot in “The Line to IT.”
My manager thanked me for my contributions and assured me that my work has been a big step towards a much needed solution. She is even putting the project into her performance appraisal in the list of accomplishments for the year. Now I realize why every single thing I did was told to be documented somewhere and not to keep anything bobbling around in my head left unwritten. Because when I make my way back to school, the project must continue with one of the other team members available, and I’m not just going to be a few cubes away!
