Posts Tagged time and billing solutions

I was invited for a meeting with the VP of HR, CIO and senior VP of a division of a large UK-based company. I walked into the meeting not sure what to expect. Usually, such meetings are very pleasant and friendly, but not a lot is accomplished in the near-term. Inaction always “happens” first.

But in this meeting we got right into it. They needed a project time management system that connected to their payroll system, and were anxious to know when we could deploy it.

About 45 minutes into the meeting, I could not resist any longer; I asked: “Why this sudden urgency to move forward with this initiative now? We tried to schedule this meeting with you months and months ago and we would never get any firm answers.”

The VP of HR shrugged and in a very sad voice said “Our IT guru just died suddenly and unexpectedly. He is the one who wrote our in-house project management system and was maintaining it all along. With him gone, we have no one who knows about the pay rules, timesheet management, and project tracking like he did. If we do not take action soon our timesheet system may stop working or not support our division’s timesheet policies. That is why we wanted to move forward with this project. We do not want to hire another IT guru and create dependency for such a system that is not a part of our core business but is a critical operational system.”

So, if you have in-house systems developed and managed by in-house IT gurus, maybe it’s time to look for a company and a solution that can provide you with a better, more cost-effective and long-term out-of-the-box solution.

The moral of the story? Don’t wait until your IT guy is dead!