So I have a dev server.
On this dev server I've been running a few utilities, that are useful to our day to day operations.
Nothing business critical really, but ... y'know, handy.
A little wiki, for keeping notes on. A checklist for our daily checks. And a little app, that just published our helpdesk call list. We used that daily, because it's actually much better suited for our purposes than our _real_ helpdesk app.
The actual helpdesk product we use requires one to log in - login expires after an hour - and actually run searches to find calls assigned to your queue. Rather than doing what any sensisible helpdesk system would do, and actively notify you, and make it _easy_ to monitor this list.
But anyway.
That's now gone now.
Been told 'not business need'. Noses have been turned up at the utilities, saying 'well, just use the official ones then'.
This has actually really pissed me off. I didn't rewrite the official utilities because I'm an egotist, or just for the hell of it. I did it because I consider the official utilities to basically not be up to scratch.
Anyway, I had got all enthused by the fact that in my review the fact that I actually looked for ways to improve our team function and role was considered a major plus. It's taken approximately 4 days for this feeling to have been squashed flat again.
Screw this. I'm now sufficiently pissed off to quit. It's not the time and effort taken (TBH I actually rather enjoyed it). It's the fact that "everyone" doesn't really see any need for actually doing that kind of thing. Y'know, taking what we do, and improving it so it's done more accurately, efficiently and easily. (And this is alongside pretending as a company that we're vaguely interested in Six Sigma and ITIL)
So now I've basically been told 'go back to using the official one'. Yay for Microsoft sharepoint (if you've ever used it, you'll know it's no where near as useful as a wiki) and our 'official' helpdesk system (which isn't, it's some bodge job which only exists because it's good at reporting statistics, and actually is a major pain in the arse for actually using to do our job with)
I of course, have been sneered at for even thinking I could do something better than Microsoft.
On the plus side, my review was sufficiently positive that I was reconsidering wanting to do stuff for the VSO, but now I don't actually have alot of incentive not to follow that up.