The trouble is that in today's world there are always some people trying to make trouble.

So the more info they give out there will always be someone trying to pick holes in it, moaning about how it is not enough or sad to say just too thick to understand that an estimate is not a guarantee.

All of this takes up valuable time of staff - or you need to employ more to service these inquiries.....and then we get the moans most probably from the same people about why line rental/council tax keeps on going up.

I do the same - if people want an estimate of time I'll give it to them. If they keep on coming back or I keep on being asked endlessly I start to put out a load of rubbish. Which do they want - me to produce umpteen status estimates or to actually do the job?

In reply to a post by zom22:

The trouble is that in today's world there are always some people trying to make trouble.

So the more info they give out there will always be someone trying to pick holes in it, moaning about how it is not enough or sad to say just too thick to understand that an estimate is not a guarantee.

All of this takes up valuable time of staff - or you need to employ more to service these inquiries.....and then we get the moans most probably from the same people about why line rental/council tax keeps on going up.

I do the same - if people want an estimate of time I'll give it to them. If they keep on coming back or I keep on being asked endlessly I start to put out a load of rubbish. Which do they want - me to produce umpteen status estimates or to actually do the job?

Exactly.

I wonder how many of these people have actually tied managing a project of 1% of the size of FTTC rollout let alone trying to manage interfaces to numerous external subcontractors or public bodies. It is not easy ...

I once had someone "moaning" about one of my major programmes - he was invited to follow me for a week. He lasted three days before he told me he then realised what was actually going on.

In reply to a post by zom22:

The trouble is that in today's world there are always some people trying to make trouble.

The touble is that in today's worl,d there are always businesses to hide thier sloppy management and the way they waste peoples' money.

All of this takes up valuable time of staff - or you need to employ more to service these inquiries

Are you serious? How many more staff do you think it would take to update a one-sentence status description each time they had to make a change to the date or status within their own internal systems? Do you think whoever updates a date and presses Enter then needs to write down a brief sentence on a bit of paper and then hand it to a new person who they will employ specifically for the purpose of going into the same record and finding the record that has just been updated by the previous person and then updating it to add the description that has just been given to them on paper by that previous person?

They could emply this person from the other people that will no longer be needed to service the existing enquiries that keep coming in becuase of a lack of information being publicised. Yes, putting out a status update on a web site along with the latest estimated date would actiually SAVE a lot of time in dealing with enquiries, and it would also save the time of staff on this forum too who chase up hundreds of status updates on cabinets becuase of enquirie. In fact, the vast majority of enquiries seen on Superfast Cymru's Twitter are things like "When is my cabinet being done?", "What's the delay?", etc. They jsut don't put this information out on the web site. So they have a couple of staff employed specifically to answer these queries on Twitter, or more specifically to cut and paste the standard reply "Sorry, we don't give out any information because things can change". Presumably, they can't be bothered to update things when things do change.

I do the same - if people want an estimate of time I'll give it to them. If they keep on coming back or I keep on being asked endlessly I start to put out a load of rubbish.

Great customer service you provide, to give people rubbish. I take it that if you are delayed on a job then you don't bother telling people (you keep the date a secret) or you just make the change and accept them to swallow it without explanation (maybe because you keep allowing other work to leapfrog it therefore you don't want them to know the real explanation), and if you keep putting it back and putting it back then they are not supposed to get fed up with you and complain?

Which do they want - me to produce umpteen status estimates or to actually do the job?

In an outfit like BT, engineers do have to produce logs and reports on things that they have done, or have not been able to do, and give reasons. In fact, any business needs to have job sheets and logs and things like that (don't you?). Presumably, this information is then input into computer systems by people who are not actually doing the physical job, therefore the time taken to put in status updates and publicise to the customer does not affect the physical job being done.

Are you actually in business? You don't seem to have a very good idea of how business works.

Edited by deleted (Tue 16-Dec-14 10:00:20)

For all the moans though am seeing a good level of activity with regards to Exchange Only lines and FTTP is popping up.

Here in lies the problem until its 100% at superfast there will be complaints, and am willing to bet that even if a 100% goal was announced it would be too slow, or people complain about the order it is being done in.

Some of the PR does not help, and have fed back on some real gaffes when I have heard them to get people better educated. Keeping an eye on the announcements is a long job, but it needs to be done to keep an eye on the 'facts' that published.

I think you may be missing my point. It's not that there has been a delay, it's the way the delay has unfolded.

Any of the above examples you have given would have been apparent long before the final implementation date. If e.g. they only started planning roadworks a week or two before intending to go live I suggest they need a new project manager. This is something that should have been arranged months ago. And if it had been, then I wouldn't have been so upset, as I fully accept unforeseen things may happen.

But my point is that the timing of the delay strongly suggests that nothing unforeseen has occurred. They have simply moved a placemark with no thought as to how that might affect people. And that is why I am angry. It's apparent that my exchange should never have been on the Coming Soon lists in the first place, so all they have done is got people's hopes up for nothing.

And I have been in touch with my LA. They are not aware of any reason why the delay has taken place.

And, finally, if I am wrong and some major issue did happen just days before go live, serious enough to delay the implementation by 18 months, then I maintain that such a significant delay should warrant some kind of explanation. It's not acceptable to pull the rug out from under people at such a late stage without any information whatsoever.

In your experience do the power people make such late demands for connection just before implementation? Shouldn't the agreements to cover this be made well in advance? It seems a little odd to me that such an important aspect be left until a week or two before implementation. I doubt any power company will do anything without more notice than that.

In 99% of cases the planning and checks do match exactly what is found in the ground.

The complaints and shifting date cabinets seem to be perhaps just 1% of the cabinets going live each month, which seems to be around 1000 per month at current rates.

Maybe if they doubled or trebled the number of staff in the planning and checking side better dates would be possible, but then there would be more questions about BT wasting money and not delivering value for money in terms of what is delivered. 100% perfection in planning generally means more time or more money or both.

I'm sure this does happen. But it strikes me that any project manager who doesn't scope this kind of thing out before committing to a specific go-live date needs to go back to school. Any boundary issues should be handled well in advance, and if it turns out that they might delay the project then this should come to light well before the go live date

I disagree that the only alternatives are information on every step or no information at all. If something happens to cause a significant delay then explanations are warranted. And a brief explanation should not cost a lot in time or resources.

Have they committed to a specific go live date? Or just provided an estimate?