Set the stage – for the last year the most uncooperative, self-important person I have ever encountered has been talking about how awful the new infrastructure is and how painful the process has been.
Every time she whined, I paid attention. The negativity is annoying, but there are nuggets in those statements. The way I see it? Listening to tales of woe are invaluable when you are doing a task or designing a task. If I can avoid encountering those issues by preparing on my side, the whole painful process will be less disruptive to productivity. In days of yore, we called this pre-processing. I think one of the buzzwords is operational excellence.
The little task I was bragging about yesterday? She started that process last February! I think she completed it in January. I forgot. I don’t really care. The only reason I know about is frequent audits of her historical artifacts identifies missing responses from my teams.
I started the task on January 26, 2016. I negotiated to minimize the impact on team operations. The development team made my site read-only last Thursday – St. Patrick’s Day 2016. Cool. This is a system, infrastructure migration, a little maintenance time is necessary. We didn’t decide to do this. TPTB did. We are merely complying.
I am proud to say that I was able to complete the mirrored migration in less than a week. It isn’t a brand, new, beautiful, fully-functional site, but it is enough to keep us working in a brave new world. I am readying myself for the adoption complaints, but that is when I see opportunities for improvement!!
Here’s a little insight into me, when you whine, I listen and learn….