IT cock-ups: When scheduling goes wrong...

Bad days in the office revisited

Scheduling may not sound like the most exciting of subjects but when a company gets it wrong the effects can be disastrous (as anyone who got paid late in March this year thanks to a 'processing problem' at Barclays will testify). Here we look at five major IT nightmares, with tips on how to avoid them supplied by scheduling specialist SBB. Barclays Bank Employees of companies who used Barclays to handle their payroll got a nasty surprise in March this year: they weren't paid on time. The bank made an error involving the handling of payments and debits, leading to a delay in processing payrolls as well as payments to suppliers of the 20,000 or so businesses that bank with the group. The cock-up happened around the bank holiday weekend. Jock Hunter, UK country manager of SBB, commented: "This could be down to a failure to schedule the payment instruction because it was a non-routine event - a bank holiday. A job scheduler which has sophisticated calendar facilities and works across different platforms would help avoid this sort of situation occurring." An unnamed major investment bank When a major investment bank which used the CREST system for trading settlement experienced an IT system crash, it thought its back-up systems would kick in - but got a nasty surprise. That system's schedule for the daily back-up of transactions hadn't been maintained. The backlog of processing batches prevented settlement deadlines for the day's trading being met. The bank and its customers' equity was tied up as a consequence. The bank was fined by the regulatory authorities for its failure to meet the deadlines. Hunter said: "Backing-up files is a vital 'behind the scenes' processing task. Such tasks can be automated on main and back-up systems to avoid such a serious situation." HBoS When the Bank of England last put up the base interest rate, Halifax Bank of Scotland failed to inform its cheque account customers. Rules governing the sector demand that formal letters must be despatched to all those affected. The mistake was discovered after a customer wrote to the bank. Halifax has cited a communications error and said that its back office functions are working properly. SBB's Hunter commented: "This incident could be down to a failure to schedule notification. Since this was a probably a non-regular event (ie not monthly or weekly) it was probably down to human error in not scheduling the advice in the first place. But it could equally have been down to them NOT using a UC4 type product to solicit such changes and then issuing notices." A major international stock exchange Late, unscheduled orders from overseas investors caused a system to go down for several hours. Hunter said: "The exchange operations went down for a number of hours because of a failure to schedule all requests for trading within given time frames. A job scheduling tool can be used to fully automate such functions, avoiding the possibility of system crash." E*Trade Website E*Trade experienced a failure which meant that for a limited time it couldn't process jobs online 24x7. The series of processes - processing the order, checking accounts, notification of warehousing and despatch - were not being completed. Hunter said: "Although the precise cause is difficult to ascertain, it seems likely that with ecommerce sites, many of the ordering tasks are duplicated unnecessarily. A job scheduler would enable such tasks to be carried out in a more orderly fashion, leading ultimately to better service to customers."