No civilian business would survive for long with this approach to IT
Nope - and they wouldn't have "big-banged" it either, not for a mission-critical system like this (and before anyone thinks this isn't mission critical, where is morale going to go if they don't rescue this farce shortly (ie if we don't get paid)? Then again - can it go lower?)
This should have been live trialled for at least 2 months, which is a pain in the butt running 2 systems side-by-side but at least proves that it works properly instead of just doing a flashy demonstration to an IPT which probably hasn't got a clue what it's looking at anyway. Personally I had no doubt it would be a farce when I was doing the training - one of the bits of the emergency contact form (most of you won't have got that far yet!!!) asks "Is this contact your NOK?". A yes or no answer indicated by a tick or check box or something you would have thought? Nope - you have to click the little torch icon, type a * in the search box and then select the answer from the presented lsit which is either a ......... YES OR NO! Some bl**dy poorly trained techno geek showing off by using all the HCI tools at his disposal whether its appropriate or not. I had a vain hope that this was just a developmental software glitch which would be picked up by a moderately skilled tester, but no, silly me I thought they'd actually user test the software - how naive. And if you think that's a tiny little issue - wait until you get to try to fill in your posting preferences - it will take you all day just to trawl through the multiple screens full of options. I gave up after going through 5 screens and I hadn't even hit a RAF posting yet (Army comes before RAF in the alphabet - geddit?).
The HCI on this project is pants. Poorly designed, user unfriendly and, as usual, we haven't invested in sufficient network bandwidth to cope with the demand.
Think yourselves lucky if you have never managed to log on yet - your nightmares have not yet started.
