Funny story, the 3rd job I had was at this large telecommunications company. I was doing consulting, but one of the jobs I had to do was make sure that these very important reports were generated. They had to be printed out and sent over the interoffice mail.
I figured, why not generate the reports programmatically and stick them on an intranet website (this was 1999 so "intranets" were becoming a buzzword). I asked my boss, he said okay go contact the people who need the report and see if they are okay with that.
I called the person A that normally got the reports, and they said "Oh, I don't need them, I pass them off to B". So then I called B and they said they passed it to C. This went on for about 5 people, and then it turned out that no one needed the reports. It was just something that was ingrained into the process, but no one actually needed.
The funny thing is that because no one had ownership, I could neither change the process, nor get the reports from being printed in the first place. Truly Office Space-esque
I figured, why not generate the reports programmatically and stick them on an intranet website (this was 1999 so "intranets" were becoming a buzzword). I asked my boss, he said okay go contact the people who need the report and see if they are okay with that.
I called the person A that normally got the reports, and they said "Oh, I don't need them, I pass them off to B". So then I called B and they said they passed it to C. This went on for about 5 people, and then it turned out that no one needed the reports. It was just something that was ingrained into the process, but no one actually needed.
The funny thing is that because no one had ownership, I could neither change the process, nor get the reports from being printed in the first place. Truly Office Space-esque