Company Tells Employee He Can Only Get Access To Database By Submitting A Ticket. So He Submits 400 Of Them.

This is one of those stories where someone gets exactly what they ask for, and instantly regrets it!

What did Aesop say? “Be careful what you wish for, in case it comes true!”

This man on reddit explains how the IT department at his work denied him access to a database he needed, and how it would come back to bite them!

To give some background, I was working as a Data Analyst at a company in the ed-tech sector. For one of my projects, I created a report that we could give to the sales team, that they could then use when asking clients to renew their contract.

The report was all graphs (even adults like pretty pictures) and it showed the clients data on how teachers/students were using the product. Then our sales guys could show hey X% of your students and teacher are using this X times a week, so you should sign a new contract with us.

Sales loved the report and wanted to use it for ALL renewals, and we had 5,000+ clients.

Everything was going great, until he needed access to a database that only IT could get into. To get any data for the report, he would need to submit an individual ticket.

If I wanted data, I had to put in a ticket, name all the data points I wanted, and I could only name 1 client per ticket.

Also IT did their work in sprints which are basically 2 week periods of work. The tickets were always added to the NEXT sprint, so I ended up having to wait 2-4 weeks for data.

Seems like there should be a simple solution to this, right? Just give him access to the data!

I reached out to IT and requested direct access to the database, so I could stop putting in tickets and just pull (query) the data myself.

But that would be WAY too logical for this IT department!

Well that was immediately denied, all data requests will be filled by ONLY IT, and as a Research person I needed to stay in my lane.

I wasn’t happy and sales wasn’t happy with the delay but there was nothing anyone could do.

Soon, he and the sales department came up with a plan to make IT see the error in their ways.

Since data was going to take 2-4 weeks to arrive could he please send me EVERYONE that has a renewal coming up in the next 2-4 weeks. With 5,000+ customers that averages about 100 renewals a week.

Armed with my list of 400+ clients, I figured out when the next sprint started and cleared my schedule for the day BEFORE the new IT sprint started. At about 1 ticket a minute, it was going to take about 6 hours and 40 minutes to submit all the tickets so that’s what I spent my whole Friday doing.

This meant a huge headache for IT.

Lets not forget, they had to get the data for all the tickets during the next sprint as long as I submitted them before 5pm on Friday. That meant they had to take care of all 400 tickets in the next 2 weeks plus I submitted tickets throughout their spring planning meeting so they couldn’t even plan for it all.

Not to mention how maddening it would be to hear all those notifications roll in throughout the day!

Most of them had push notifications set up so they got pinged every time a ticket was submitted. I would have paid good money to be a fly on the wall during that meeting watching a new ticket pop up about every minute.

While they soldiered through the first week, he could tell the influx of tickets was wearing them down.

I will give them full credit, they fulfilled every single ticket, but there was a lot of long days for them (everyone was salary so no overtime pay either).

This is of course on top of all the other tickets they needed to complete, so it was quite a stressful sprint.

Finally the IT manager came to him, and exhausted by the tickets, finally gave him the access he wanted.

He is bug eyed and asked me how many tickets I was planning on submitting. I told him the same amount as last time (I only had 200 this time but he didn’t know that), and I am pretty sure I saw him break on the inside.

I did feel bad at this point so I said, “Alternatively you could just give me access to the database and I could query the data myself”.

I had the access before noon.

Reddit cheered him and his tickets.

One person familiar with these systems doing think their process is too “agile.”

The IT guys really couldn’t make heads or tails about why they did this.

This policy really doesn’t make sense.

Hopefully they learned their lesson… but you never know what goofy policy companies like this will come up with next.

Do better!

If you liked that post, check out this one about an employee that got revenge on HR when they refused to reimburse his travel.