Taken Aback

The Gorse Fox had a busy day, but at least he was working at home. Documents had to be drafted and sent out, diagrams checked and revised and the every increasing list of outstanding tasks trimmed through action and intervention.

The ever more complex management of the interrelationships between the tasks, actions, questions, issues, problems, and decisions is becoming a severe challenge to limitations of Excel. So it was that the Gorse Fox decided he probably needed a more robust system that would be able to manage these relationships – and thus he started to look at various database solutions.

Now the problem with databases is not the complexity of the underlying system and the way in which you create the various relationships. That is really rather well covered by the basic tools. The real issue lies around the tooling for provide the interface to the database. Whilst the Gorse Fox likes writing code, that is not the objective of the exercise. He just wants to use a system, and not have to spend weeks developing code. This doesn’t really leave too many choices when you get down to it. There’s Filemaker and there’s Access and a few also-rans.

GF logged in to the Starfleet procurement system, fully expecting it to tell him to push off. However, he went through the catalogue, found Access 2010 and pressed the button. A few minutes later he received notification that the purchase had been authorised and he should expect detail to arrive over the next 48 hours. To say he was taken aback would be an understatement.