The data services IT department is astonishingly inefficient and wasteful. A response to another review, the company stated proudly that Sentry has the largest IT organization in central Wisconsin. I'm sure that's true, and that's exactly the problem.
Sentry has thousands of people doing work that could be accomplished by about 150 skilled developers and database admins. That's not to say they don't have skilled developers--they do, but the project managers and directors tend to be incompetent and there are rarely sufficient requirements passed to developers.
My department hilariously tried to implement a half-agile methodology. We had scrum meetings every other day, no sprint review, but a "sprint planning" where the project manager simply told us what we were doing the rest of the month-long sprint. The "sprints" often ended up being useless since the project manager was unable to address logistical issues by the time it ended.
As a result, for months at a time I did practically nothing at work. No one really cared, because the sprints were so unproductive anyway that I blended in.
I could go on for hours about this, but suffice to say, the Sentry IT department is one you want to avoid if you are interested in gaining skills for your career. If only I could get this portion of my life back...
