So there’s this guy at work who specifies the security requirements for the system I’m working on. He’s not a bad guy but sometimes doesn’t recognize the impact of the decisions he’s making. For instance, he’s a little paranoid about security and he wants everyone to be able to see ONLY their stuff. This may not sound like a big deal, but SAP – the software I’m working on – isn’t really set up to easily accommodate this.

Well, I take that back. Its easy, but it’s a very manual process. In this case, he didn’t want managers to be able to look at internal orders or cost center groups for anyone but themselves. I told this guy that the only way we could do this was to have a separate security role for each cost center group and for each internal order.

There are a lot of cost center groups but fortunately they don’t change much. So although it’s a lot of work up front, there isn’t a lot of on-going maintenance of it so I didn’t mind it so much. The internal orders, though are a horse of another color. Every time a new project gets started or every time someone wants to track something specially I will now have to create a new role for it. And there are a lot of internal orders to start with.

I tried to explain this to the designer-guy – that it would mean a lot of work to start with an a lot of effort to continue to maintain these things and it didn’t seem to phase him. He clearly saw it as much more of a deficiency with SAP than something he needs to take in to account.

So I’ve been staring at this mountain of security work for the few days, knowing it would take me weeks… WEEKS to plow through this. And I didn’t want to even go near it. I started work on it this morning and after about an hour I decided that there HAD to be a better way than the very painful, tedious repetitious keying.

So I wrote a program to do it. It took about 30 minutes and it works perfectly! I think it saved me about three weeks of work!! HAH!

HA!

Between you and me: sometimes I really kick ass.

So now what do I do? Should I impress everyone and tell them that I’m three weeks ahead of schedule because I am JUST that good? Or should I amuse myself for three weeks and let them know that I’m done when my deadline arrives?

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