Its not my fault, the mechanic did it!

Whose fault is it anyway?

I recently had the misfortune of having to deal with a difficult "customer" but I was glad it happened because I've been waiting to use this analogy for ages.

The usual story with chaotic IT departments is that they get the blame for everything.  The customers lose faith in the IT departments ability to deliver or maintain and as a result whenever something doesn't work as intended the propensity is to blame IT.


The problem that was put to me was that if the system wasn't working, the stores couldn't process orders and do their work, and this creates a problem.  The regional manager wasn't getting that what he'd described was not our problem in anyway.  It was beyond our control and the users were actually part of the problem due to their lack of instruction, propagated by the lack of leadership in this area.  When the supervisor doesn't know how to do something, they can't teach their direct report staff how to do it either.  Enter the analogy.

The analogy

I asked him how he used to do things before the computer system was there.  A little bit of a struggle but in the end, he accepted there was always manual ways things could be done and a good old piece of paper and pen was always to hand.  I related this to his journey to work.

Before you had a car you walked to work, the invention of the Car made it much more convenient for you to get to work and cut down the commute time immensely.  You were happily commuting to work in your car for many weeks, you couldn't even remember how you got to work without it.  One day, the car breaks down and you get a quote from the mechanic saying it will take at least 3 days to fix.


So in the meantime what do you do?  If you don't go into work there will be consequences but who's fault is that?  Not the mechanics fault, you can't hold them responsible for you not being able to get to work.  You can shout at the mechanic in the hope they'll work faster but if they have got to order in parts and wait for them to be delivered that won't really help.  It's not the mechanics responsibility for you to get to work, the car is just a tool to aid you in doing the job.  If your car is unreliable, consider getting a new one (see my next blog When to upgrade and when not to).  The analogy can go deeper here about the similarities between vendor lockin and leasing deals on cars but that's not the idea of this blog.