Dear Users... (A thread for Sysadmin, Technical Support, and Help Desk people)

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quadraginta said:
I was at a doctor's appointment yesterday. For context, this doctor worked for a large medical center which was part of a University medical complex involving dozens of smaller satellite clinics as well as a number of regional hospitals and other facilities. All using the same central system.

She was struggling with doing some data input on my records while I was sitting there. As I watched she explained that they had just revamped their data entry system.

After some further questioning I was able to determine that there had been no prep or training. They had just remodeled everything and left the people using the system to puzzle it out on their own.

I have seen this happen before. Every year or so. It seems to be the MO of their IT people.

Hella way to run a hospital network.
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Usually it is the interface design team. And with medical software they are usually the product vendor. Their people always seem to think that a revamped interface will be "much more obvious" to users than the older versions. Each new version has the same problem. You can see this with each new version of Windows.
 
quadraginta said:
After some further questioning I was able to determine that there had been no prep or training. They had just remodeled everything and left the people using the system to puzzle it out on their own.

I have seen this happen before. Every year or so. It seems to be the MO of their IT people.

Hella way to run a hospital network.
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Well yeah because people think it's the IT people's job to train you how to do your job.

Yeah same here. Almost none of my user base was ever "trained" in any real sense to do their job, they shadowed someone else for a little bit.

The problem is this leaves with cargo cult knowledge.
 
Oh boy, I'm being shuffled to a window desk! I've been wanting this for months.

It has to happen today. And I've got a two-hour lunch break scheduled for an appointment.
 
arthwollipot said:
Oh boy, I'm being shuffled to a window desk! I've been wanting this for months.

It has to happen today. And I've got a two-hour lunch break scheduled for an appointment.
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Aaaaargh, sunlight.....
I prefer basements. With tunnels.
 
quadraginta said:
I was at a doctor's appointment yesterday. For context, this doctor worked for a large medical center which was part of a University medical complex involving dozens of smaller satellite clinics as well as a number of regional hospitals and other facilities. All using the same central system.

She was struggling with doing some data input on my records while I was sitting there. As I watched she explained that they had just revamped their data entry system.

After some further questioning I was able to determine that there had been no prep or training. They had just remodeled everything and left the people using the system to puzzle it out on their own.

I have seen this happen before. Every year or so. It seems to be the MO of their IT people.

Hella way to run a hospital network.
Click to expand...

I've heard the doctors and staff say the same thing about our EMR that we spent a billion dollars and four years implementing. All of them attended weeks of training classes, were compelled to pass tests on the material, and had a whole team of (overworked and underpaid) implementation folks and trainers holding their hands for weeks before and after it went live, and continuing education and constant support ever since. Yet when they don't know how to do something they definitely ought to know how to do, they'll tell the patient "we didn't get any training, they just switched everything overnight!"

It's like those kids in school who complain the teacher never taught them whatever it is they just failed.
 
The medical field is absolutely the worst at perpetually maintaining the mythology that computers in an office environment is this new fangled idea that got dropped on them out of the blue with no warning and zero "ramp up" only in the last few days and they are still struggling to adjust.

It's 2021. I still hear "Oh when I started working here we didn't use computers" at least once a week which *check calendar* doesn't add up mathematically.

And hell I'm 42. I'm not some spring chicken. I hear this from people who are maybe, maybe 10 years older than me at most.
 
As I said before, my job for a few years was writing code that mapped medical records from Cerner, Systmone, NHS Medway etc etc into a common format. The data sanitising was ridiculous. One system, the first I worked on, it was a total guess which date format any given field was in. Some critical fields were free text when they should have been coded. Etc.
 
TragicMonkey said:
I've heard the doctors and staff say the same thing about our EMR that we spent a billion dollars and four years implementing. All of them attended weeks of training classes, were compelled to pass tests on the material, and had a whole team of (overworked and underpaid) implementation folks and trainers holding their hands for weeks before and after it went live, and continuing education and constant support ever since. Yet when they don't know how to do something they definitely ought to know how to do, they'll tell the patient "we didn't get any training, they just switched everything overnight!"

It's like those kids in school who complain the teacher never taught them whatever it is they just failed.
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I can sympathize with that, but in this instance I don't believe it to be the case. I've been using this same medical complex for decades. Some of the doctors, nurses, PAs, etc., I have known and been seeing regularly for many years. I have watched them use the systems without issue, and then they struggle for a week or so, and get back to normal. This happens periodically.

I believe them when they tell me changes are made without them being given sufficient advance warning or training.

Do I trust the word of the people who have been treating me for years more than the competence and thoroughness of faceless medical IT people whose budget is determined by bean-counters in the accounting office?

Why, yes. Yes, I do.

MY ex-wife (not the late Mrs. qg) is an RN who worked for the same outfit for years. I heard her stories firsthand. Do I trust her more than the faceless medical IT people whose budget is determined by bean-counters in the accounting office?

Why, yes. Yes, I do.

I could go on, but I won't.
 
It's not a matter of "questioning" them when they say the had IT systems dumped on them without training.

It's a matter of them acting like them not knowing how to use their systems is the same thing as them being "broken" or making it the IT people's problem or issue to fix.

In most situations your IT staff is not responsible for user training, nor equipped to do it effectively.

I'm not saying "Oh lordie the desktop icon changed from seafoam blue to cornflower blue, now I can no longer function because something has changed" isn't a problem. I'm saying it's not my problem.
 
quadraginta said:
Curtains and/or blinds?

They exist for reasons, and it isn't always to stop peeping toms.
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Yes, there are blinds. And as far as I know they're pretty effective (double layer shadecloth). But yesterday I wasn't at my desk for sunset so I don't know exactly what it's going to be like. I'll be sure to provide an update this evening.
 
Okay so here's the thing.

We migrated everybody to Office 365 last year. Since then I've noticed a problem. In Outlook 2016, when you had access to an additional shared mailbox, you added it by going to Account Settings - Change - More Settings - Advanced, and added it to the "Open these additional mailboxes" section. This was fine. However, in Outlook 365 if you have your additional mailboxes added that way they will work for several weeks, then one day with no warning you will suddenly start getting delivery failure notification messages that say that you don't have permission to send from that mailbox.

The fix for this problem is to remove the mailbox from the additional mailboxes setting and instead add it via Account Settings - New. However, this has the disadvantage that the user now starts getting desktop alerts for new messages in all mailboxes, and the only way to turn that off is to disable desktop notifications entirely. It's either notifications for all mailboxes including your personal one, or for no mailboxes. Some of our shared mailboxes are extremely busy, getting dozens of emails every hour. A lot of people don't want a popup every few seconds. I've been doing workarounds where I suggest turning off notifications, but adding a Rule that sends a desktop notification when an email is received that is addressed to the user (or whatever other criteria they like).

Yesterday there had been a job logged to our Unified Communication team for exactly this issue - the client wanted notifications for some mailboxes, but not others. The job was returned to us from UC instructing us that adding via Account Settings - Change - More Settings - Advanced is the solution. I sent it back seeking clarification and explained the pattern I had seen. They confirmed that this was the official solution to the problem.

Well. I've just taken a call from someone who started getting delivery failure notifications from their shared mailbox. I checked and confirmed that yes they had access to the mailbox, and yes it was added as an additional mailbox rather than as an account. And I escalated it back to UC.

It remains to be seen what they will do with it.
 
JoeMorgue said:
It's not a matter of "questioning" them when they say the had IT systems dumped on them without training.

It's a matter of them acting like them not knowing how to use their systems is the same thing as them being "broken" or making it the IT people's problem or issue to fix.

In most situations your IT staff is not responsible for user training, nor equipped to do it effectively.

I'm not saying "Oh lordie the desktop icon changed from seafoam blue to cornflower blue, now I can no longer function because something has changed" isn't a problem. I'm saying it's not my problem.
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Struggling to find where the correct data input areas have been moved to is a bit more serious than changing an icon color.

And I wasn't suggesting it was your IT problem. But if it isn't somebody's IT problem then whose is it?

One of those things that just falls through the cracks?
 
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