Monthly Archives: April 2009

Don’t fear the U-turn

Listening to Radio 4 this morning (I love Farming Today!), I was listening to the news reporting that Jack Straw has executed a u-turn on the plan to build large prisons. To my amazement, people were mocking him for having changed his mind.
Much as I generally dislike Jack Straw, my opinion of him improved somewhat [...]

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Downturn thinking

Whilst I don’t want to appear to dismiss the pain of those who have been unfortunate enough to lose jobs or income as a result of the economic downturn, it appears that it’s a really exciting time for those of us who enjoy making things better.
Most companies have some form of IT infrastructure: you almost [...]

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My report is broken!

Leaving aside those odd occasions when the database has exploded, most of the reports from users telling me ‘my report is broken’ are for one of three main reasons:

User has forgotten how the report works
Incorrect data does not meet criteria
Developer error in implementing the report

The anatomy of a report
Reports can be broken down [...]

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The importance of continuity

For the last three years, I have been working on a project to bring together all the disparate systems we employ here, to simplify the task of the user and to try and ensure that when someone is off, another person can pick up the threads. Oh, the system was supposed to do much much [...]

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