Every business department at our company has their own associated IT group to support them. In addition to that, there are other departments that support the general IT infrastructure for the company. The departments that I will be talking about are general IT which do network administration, firewalls, and other necessary IT setup.
The business unit of the application support group needed a MQ connection in order to transfer data to other divisions. We provided our documentation which shows all MQ connections that we use, showing machine names, queue information, and application information. We made a special point of making sure the IT department knew which page, section and queue information that needed setup.
We were a bit surprised when after sending a fairly detailed request including our documentation. Nothing had been processed despite waiting for weeks. The request came back along with a one liner saying that the documentation was not clear. We reviewed our documentation, the request worked with the support group only to simply receive this same comment. Finally this mental masturbation was starting to threaten our schedule and so we had a face to face meeting with Charles.
Oddly enough the meeting still took about an hour of excuses and such but in the end we found out what the problem was. On a different page of our documentation, one that nothing to do with the request, we made a mistake and had the name of one of the old machines. It seems that IT had switched out one of the machines but had not informed us of that fact. This inaccuracy was the reason that our requests had been rebuffed.
We did amend our documentation and through a bit of good luck our MQ setup was done in slightly less than a month from our meeting – the overall time was about 3 months. Big companies certainly do have their own rhythm.