The program was not live but it does affect those involved immediately. You can't leave something like this to the editors. One of the two women would have been labelled a liar. If Raef took sides it would have been very difficult for the one of the two women for the rest of the program.

Anyway, as we agreed before, the situation would have been difficult to explain. Helene was present at the training but she probably was doing or thinking of something else. Perhaps she didn't make it clear for them that she is not going to do something else while they are training and most probably she watched them doing their training for a period of time.

Precisely - having already faced Sir Alan (and survived), Sara was being subjected to a 2nd 'boardroom,' by some other candidates. Raef showed decency in supporting her.

Lucinda was not being attacked on YF - she took the opportunity to settle an old score and tried to involve Raef - unprofessional on both counts. Has she been reading too much of her own publicity and now thinks she's immune from criticism; did festering resentment against Helene spill over, resulting in her lack of control; she is said to want a media career - was this a deliberate ploy by an attention seeker to turn the spotlight back onto herself?

Am I being harsh? Probably - but I really can't think of one reason which would excuse her deplorable behaviour.

Raef was put in an impossible position by Lucinda and if she really expected him to join her in her attempts to humiliate Helene, then she clearly overestimated her powers of persuasion.

Fair points.
Raef was not responsible for the Lee-Sara situation and was entitled to abstain. He chose to influence the situation that time and earned universal respect.

No doubt that both Lucinda and Helene could stand up for themselves, with Adrian Chiles egging them on for a good spat to aid ratings. Conflicts like this arise periodically in the family and in the office, situations which can go either way and set fast with longterm consequences. The outcome in this case was a very unhappy evening upstaging winner Lee. Three days later fierce battle continues in the forum.

SAS faces sudden crises like this all the time and he generally retains control with quick thinking and swift response, although it certainly helps if he has the gravitas of age and £800 million behind him.

I do not suggest it would have been at all easy for anybody to rise to instantaneous challenge. If this were an impromptu initiative test, then anybody who outperformed would have earned brownie points times 5 from me at least.

Would that have been a bad thing? Why not label a liar a liar? Why should a liar have an easy time of it?

I'm something of a fan of Helene, but I agree with the pro-Lucinda people who say that liars and bullies should be denounced. I just don't think Helene was either.

Yes we should label a liar a liar.. But what I meant to say that there was a short answer but I think it was misleading. Lucinda asked Raef if Helene attended the training?

We all saw Helene present at the training but we don't know if she declared that she was not going to be trained because she had other things to do. Most probably she took that decision without informing Raef and Lucinda i.e. she didn't pay much attention to the training itself. She was probably more interested on the end product in order to determine its suitability, profit margins, etc.

The short answer would have been yes Helene did attend the training. Raef could not have possibly said that she didn't attend. But Helene wasn't a liar. She couldn't possibly have helped Lucinda because as she explained later in the boardroom that her knowledge base was far behind Lucinda (Presumably because she was busy with something else during the training).

Also Helene was already labelled a liar after she denied that Lucinda told her that she is "technically useless". Now looking at it, I think what Helene meant to say that Lucinda was OK with doing this job. Lucinda did say that she can't use her mobile ...etc. but she ended saying that "I will do it if you think that is OK". From Lucinda's point of view, she voiced her concerns. From Helene's point of view, Lucinda was prepared to learn and do the job.

For Raef to have 'labelled a liar a liar' during the YF programme would have been idiotic and inappropropriate. He took the sensible option which was to abstain.

You (Brangdon) may well have taken the outspoken approach if you'd been him, but obviously Raef is more intelligent and far sighted than you.

I don't get why you two are giving me a hard time. I say way back in #111 that Raef did the right thing for this situation. ("As for Raef, if the above account is right then explaining it would take more time than was really appropriate.") Certainly Raef should not have given an answer that was short but misleading.

Then I thought I was asked what he should have done if the situation was different and simpler. "If one candidate was saying something blatantly untrue..." which is hypothetical given I'd already argued that both candidates were telling the truth as they saw it. I think you are confusing the hypothetical situation with the real one. In the real one I've said all along Raef did the right thing.

Stuff like process compliance - User Admin actions being fully auditable, DBA actions being fully audited, licence management.

All the cruft needed to comply wih ISO9000, Sarbanes-Oxley, mitigating post-HMRC-ballsup changes...

That kind of stuff - which can be a source of frustration for users when someone like me has to ask them to raise yet another form...

Two months later this issue remains interesting, possibly because no forum consensus was ever reached on who should have carried the blame.

Serious hardware/software training companies will issue a certificate after course attendance saying explicitly that Jane Bloggs attended training on dates X to Y. Proactive trainers will set a number of quiz questions at the end of the course, and record that candidate Jane Bloggs not only attend the course but also passed the test satisfactorily or even with distinction.

Did Helene attend the course as a candidate? There was no certificate to say either way.

Any post-course test would surely have failed Lucinda ahead of crunch time allowing a chance for remedial action. Apart from her unfamiliarity with buttons, hotkeys and mouse she probably did not understand the underlying principles of the software, nor the unwritten conventions to which modern software generally adhere and expect users to know about. Even after an engineer's emergency visit Lucinda, a person who methodically shied away from mobile phones and frankly confessed her unsuitability, still did not understand the processes.

Was Lucinda adequately trained? Surely not. It should have been obvious to the trainer. Helene should have made it her business to know an answer which was in doubt from the beginning.

Lucinda could have made it clearer she was walking a high wire strung between two tall buildings without skill or confidence -- granted the grotesquely under-trained are often the last to be aware how much they do not know, how much can emerge from below the surface and baffle first-timers.

Was an adequately trained soldier put into the front line to defend a key point in the army's defences? No.

Who entrusted the soldier to attempt a crucial task beyond her? The commander.

Soulmate has a point.

One of the most annoying type of problem calls I get is where I have a user talking down to me when they're explaining step-by-step what they were doing, and I'm translating this into what is actually going on.

Far too many staffers in a lot of companies get trained in a "monkey see monkey do" manner.. which means that when something goes wrong, or performance is slower than they expect, they aren't able to tell IT what the intended outcome is... just what the problem is. Even if they're part of a larger process - it helps to give people an idea where their contribution fits in the bigger scheme of things.

Which DEFINITELY helps when trying to resolve and possibly improve a data flow - as the actual problem could be upstream of them...

Like a badly-defined FTP job borking PDFs before the reporting team gets hold of them.

Just my thoughts...