One of the reasons I am freaking out.

I'm trying hard to do the right thing and that is vocalize and strategize changing the direction we're going in. Now when the vendor was gathering information, they decided to forgo talking to me for some reason. I'm not the business, I'm now in IT. I speak and understand the business, and can translate business into IT speak. For some reason I was left out of some crucial meetings where some assumptions were made that I could have said, "No that will not work for 100% of the time."

So now, when someone is using the product system, they are trying to find out one simple thing, "Where can I sell this product?" What this basically means is that if we've sold rights to other territories in other languages, and the product you are asking about is in the english language, well the fact that we sold German language worldwide for the title has no effect on where you can sell that particular book. The only time it would make any effect on it is if you sold the English language to someone else. It does happen from time to time, like we sell English language rights to the UK and it's territories. Truly this is a holdover from when the British ruled the world, and really no one cares that someone has Czech language rights to a book since how many Czech language readers are there in the world?

Eng lang publishing
So this application I'm working on is supposed to help be a self service system that will digest a number of contracts and spit out what the net rights are supposed to be. The problem with this is that there are no hard and fast rules. Rules that logic seem to apply work best in computers. No, rights is about exceptions, and lawyers love to craft exceptions. It works this way except when it works in this other obscure way. So the expectation is that someone with 30 years of rights contracts experience isn't needed to understand how to interpret this data. But the problem with that is, really even if you KNOW that it's right based on what the data tells you, some person who entered in the contract, may not have clicked the right button or checked off the right box and boom, your data is inaccurate. This can cost the company millions of dollars. Last year alone, millions of dollars had to be paid to authors that we missed royalties on because the contracts weren't clear in the system or didn't get processed properly. We got audited and it cost us about $14 million in back royalties and interest. Oh yes, interest, it's in the contracts, and it accrues daily.

I don't know if you'll understand the video, but if you do, then I did a good job in explaining why this is an epic fail for the moment. I have a fix, but it means postponing the rollout until after the New Year, and even then we still need to double check the logic for the legacy data.

A video of me explaining the defects of my project.