Incoherent Babble

For the last two weeks, I’ve been working to design a one-off enrollment system¹ for a client, and it seems like it’s just been one road-block after another.

First, their data was incorrect. And then again. And for good measure, a third time. To be fair, I don’t know if it was their fault or ours the second and third time (mis-communication somewhere about what translations we were making), but the first time certainly was².

Then, there’s the fact that when I notified the person in charge of coordinating this data exchange with the client, they apparently “missed” the email… And so three days later I’m asking them where the hell my answers are, and they have no clue what I’m talking about.

Next, apparently no one really knows what data the client wants to get back from us for entry into their system. On some things, they claim to want all coverages. For others, just changes. Then there’s this one piece of information they don’t seem to have thought about nor want at all…

Finally, 4 days before the system is to go live and we’ll have thousands of people from across the country calling in to enroll using it, as I’m working my ass off to correct a few bugs and get final testing in, I notice that the spreadsheet I originally got says that the client is expecting data back for a coverage we’re not supposed to be enrolling them.

Uhh, what? How can we give them back data on something we’re not enrolling? Back to the project manager we go… “Oh, right… That spreadsheet is old, I’ll see if I can find a new version for you.”

WTF? 4 days from live and I’m the one that has to realize no one bothered to give the programmer the real specs? If these were freelance clients, I’d never work for them again… Alas, they’re internal company employees and I’m not their manager…

1. We do health insurance claims-related stuff. [back]
2. They duplicated first_name in the last_name field of the data file they sent us. [back]