Thursday, December 15th, 2022, 2:35 am
Lying to Paying Clients, Not Just to Staff
Summary: Service Level Agreements (SLAs) or service-level agreements weren’t met by Sirius ‘Open Source’; it was often the fault of the management, but it will never admit this
THE series has thus far not given many concrete examples; nor did it name any clients. It’s never the intention to name any clients at all. This series is not about clients of Sirius. However, to demonstrate some of the failures this past year, consider the following examples from the internal report.
Examples
In recent years, in addition to the above, colleagues were compelled to become less honest with clients, all for the sake of saving face. In fact, there are countless examples of ‘cover-up’, but the following portion gives just one example (with redaction for privacy reasons).
Client chasing Sirius twice:
May I have an update on this please? I am on holiday next week and would have liked this resolved.
Thank you.
Kind regards,
?????????????????.
Later:
Just realised that this is still outstanding, any news please?
Thank you.
Kind regards,
?????????????????.
Sirius staff:
EXTERNAL EMAIL: Do not trust links or attachments without checking.
Sorry ?????????????????, the person looking into this has gone on maternity leave so this ticket must have been missed. As far as I’m aware the disk will be replaced by ????????????????? as its under warranty but we need to know the serial number of the failed disk. Is this something you could give us?
Thanks,
Sirius staff to Sirius CEO:
Hi ?????????????????,
Can I be honest with him and say I did flag it up but people were too busy? Or something else?
Thanks,
For brevity’s sake, this one example may suffice for now.
To be clear, there’s lots of wrong stuff here, more so than ‘wrong’ staff, as this makes pertinent staff look bad, even staff that does good work, causing staff to feel dishonest, in effect lying to oneself and lowing personal credibility among clients. This point will be revisited in the last section.
Nobody wishes to believe he or she works in a company that deceives the press, the clients, and even its own workers. False promises, false explanations and fictional excuses contribute to a climate of suspicion and distrust. A year ago there were unfulfilled expectations of weekly updates about what the company was doing; it only took about a week for such promises to fade away.
Tomorrow we’ll give examples of failing to meet Service Level Agreements (SLAs) or failing in other aspects.