It's a question of governance

You don't just delegate that kind of thing and assume it's all going to be ok and never think about it again.

Someone somewhere will have presented "this is our solution for this system" to some audience, which would have included people who know you shouldn't be doing this kind of thing in Excel at all, let alone the 2003 version of it (as well as the column limit, someone let the row limit go: later versions of Office have far more possible rows than the 2003 version of Office, and it was the number relating to the 2003 version which came out).

Questions like "how many cases can this system handle, where is the boundary and why does it break down" should have been asked at this meeting. The person commissioning the project should have got a presentation or at the very least a one-sider saying this is the system we're putting in place, it's been tested within these parameters, here is the region of inputs where we think it will work, here are the boundaries where it will stop working.

This isn't rocket science; it's project management 101, and governance process should be in place to make sure it all happens correctly. Obviously, though, it wasn't.

Bad governance has obtained in many departments under governments of all political persuasions. That doesn't mean it's ok, or that ministers shouldn't take responsibility when it happens in their departments. Part of their job is to oversee governance arrangements and for a critical project with all eyes on it you'd expect much, much better.

Posted By: Old Man, Oct 6, 13:26:06