He was sat leafing through a pile of documents and notes and cross referencing them with the elderly change management system on the computer.
“What are you up to?” Asked Dave hurriedly.
“I’m trying to get a picture of how we got here.” Sam answered not looking at Dave.
“What do you mean?” Dave looked concerned.
Sam stopped, looked at Dave and paused a moment. “I’m cross referencing what I see in the system with what the change system says should have happend and trying to build a, ehm, timeline. I’m also looking at the incident tracking system and seeing if there’s a relationship.” Sam said, gears still turning in his head. Dave looked a bit lost.
“What’s the aim?”
“I don’t know yet. But I think it might be useful.”
“Oh.” Dave didn’t look sure, but looked hesitent, historically it turned out best to leave Mike and Sam to get on with the things that they get curious about.
“For example, it takes the team an average of four hours to deploy the booking system, that’s about 3 hours longer than it used to take my old team. then on average every third release has a serious issue. This is just for production… the numbers get more concerning once you get into the development environments. Another thing I note none of the incident resolutions have a cause or a solution.” Sam drummed his finger on the table. Mike was looking at him seemingly deep in thought as well.
Normally they’d have a joke, but today they didn’t feel like it, the department was having another desk move and reorg, actions one and two of the “everything has gone to shit and these will make everything right again” standard business plan. Mike had been on every floor of the building and on this floor he’d sat in every area, it never got any better.