Inherently there is resistance to change. Changing things requires work.
Recently, our department has become somewhat unpopular to some because we've asked people to make changes to their email settings. Nobody likes it when email doesn't work. Things should simply work.
Months ago, I had a vision. I had a plan and I sold people on it. The plan was for email to simply work. Wherever you go, it worked. It worked securely, it worked quickly and it didn't require any changes or forms.
People here are on the go, they go on trips, they go to villages, they go around the country and out of the country and until today, when they would go, it would be a small mountain of paper work accompanied by the hassle of changing email settings, and possibly losing email.
Today, after months of work, puzzle solving, trying to figure out how to get around different requirements, I was able to announce that as a team, we have made email... WORK from Anywhere.
The announcement has been out for ten minutes, and already the praises are flooding in. People going to Australia to have babies are happy, people going to the village are happy, people going on medivac's who don't have time to fill out the forms are happy.
It's a happy day. And I'm glad we were able to make lives easier, even if it meant, for the last month, people have been upset about the changes... now that they see why I think they will glad they did.
ALSO,..
today we did a short computer orientation for the new arrivals here. This is something that wasn't previously done, but was an idea me and another guy had to reduce the amount of confusion that people have when they come here, and thus reduce the amount of unnecessary work our dept. sees.
It felt good to see the fruit of some of the labor. The last few months have been tough because a lot of things have been not working right, breaking, etc. Hey, that's why I'm here!
Still, it's really nice to have a success that everyone can enjoy from time to time.
The short version: - After a lot of work, trials and failures, I was able to make things better.
