I was in a somewhat similar situation. At least they were right to bring in outsiders.hobie16 wrote:Sadly, this is true of most big companies. For some reason they think they can buy someone from the outside that will take them to the next level. The new guy comes in, pisses off the people that have been building the business for years by telling them they don't know anything, hangs around for a while, screws things up, cashes in some stock options and splits for another company which sometimes turns out to be one of your competitors. And rather than replace the now gone ace with someone who knows what to do, they go get another outsider.
At the time the Federal Courts were on a large number of basically incompatible systems. At the Headquarters, where I was hired, the Budget System did not have any interface to the Accounting System. And almost all of the accounting systems used Cash Basis instead of double entry bookkeeping.
When I was interviewed I was told that management had decided on a comprehensive system from an outside vendor, and the team they put together, with one exception, had nobody on it with more than a year at the agency and was not beholden to any system currently in place.
For those familiar with the Federal Government, everybody was hired in at the GS-13 level. We rode sort of roughshod over everybody. It took a few years to get everything set up, but we set up a complete new coding system and redesigned almost all the accounting forms for the new system. We had everything tested, including a parallel operation for a while, and provided instruction for the financial staff in all Federal Courts.
When we went live, 33 months after I was hired, everything worked correctly. When I retired 17 years after being hired, over 80 of 96 courts were all on one accounting system with a two way interface to the central system. I just was working as a "tour guide" at WDW for a former co-worker (still with the agency) for a couple of days this past week and he was telling me that all the courts are now on the one system, complete with real time interactions.
So bringing in the outsiders does work once in a while. BTW, when I retired I was one of those extremely rare birds, a non-supervisory GS-15.
