Processes are like a cage. If you working with humans you don’t need them, but are definitely required when working with animals.
The processes at work were quite heavy which is somewhat understandable as after all we were speaking about the treasury, you know where the money comes from. People whether they are regular business people or IT people just want to get their job done. Despite what the rules say they tend to behave in a manner most likely to get things done.
I like Lewis a lot but he can be a bit of an optimist, and so he put together a small program which was intended as a work around for a failure in the vendor’s system. He knew that the vendor, his ex-employer, was working on it and would be coming up with a solution any day. The planning period for releasing new program changes to production is two months so Lewis took a short cut.
He created a small script that could be scheduled by the system to be run periodically during the day and put it into the temporary directory on the production server. He didn’t need to deal with IT nor its processes.
Well, Lewis left the company but his fix was still sitting in the temporary directory. There wasn’t anything our group could do about it but we did document the situation and save the script. Well, eventually a system restart did delete the script and of course the scheduler kept reporting an error about the program not existing. Zachary received a phone call from Sara in the business group about a problem.
It turned out that she saw a process that was scheduled to run each day but it kept failing so she simply deleted it. She told us that she knew nothing about the process that was failing but she deleted it anyway. It was only some days after the last down time that she realized that some data was no longer being processed.
It is difficult to say who made the bigger mistake. Was it Lewis who put a program where it would eventually be deleted due to system cleanup or was it Sara who deleted a process that was failing despite not knowing anything about it.