Yesterday and today, three of my co-workers and I inter-connected our exchange mail systems so that we could share our calendars in outlook. It may sound easy, but it was no small feat. While it wasn’t exactly rocket science, it did require weeks of preparation and schedule coordination, and several hours of research.
Knowing that our project would take a while, we decided to do the work over the weekend, so that our users would have as little downtime as possible. We sent out the announcement to everyone - several days ahead of time - saying that we’d be starting promptly at 5:00 Friday, that we’d be down all night Friday, and that we’d be continuing this work through the weekend. We clarified that we planned to have basic functionality restored by midnight Friday, but that certain aspects, such as distribution lists, might be down until Monday morning.
The first complication hit before our project even started. At 4:30, the point where I had planned on doing final preparation for the project, one of my other servers crashed. I spent the next 25 minutes getting that server up and running again, which only left me five minutes for my last-second prep work. Forty-five minutes later – almost a full hour after our announced start time – one of my co-workers told me that she had numerous workers still using email. She ran around frantically reminding them of our planned work, which set us back further.
Finally, after about an hour, we began our work in earnest. Old connections were deleted, new connections were made, the most efficient methods of communication were recalculated, and we waited… and waited… and waited. Two of the three connections weren’t working. After an hour or so on the phone with my guru at corporate headquarters, we finally figured out the problem, reconfigured the non-functional connections, and waited some more. In short order, the basic functionality was restored, so I sent out an email saying that people could use basic email again, and that we’d continue work in the morning. I went to bed around midnight, after a 16 hour day.
My co-workers and I had planned on picking up the work at around 9:00, but my boss called me at about 8:45 and told me there were problems. I verified the issue and immediately started working on a solution. At 9:00 one of the VPs (I’ll call him Napoleon, because he’s a little man who wields a large corporate sword), emailed my boss and me, screaming because his email didn’t work, telling us that this was unacceptable, and demanding to know when it would be fixed. Never mind the fact that he was trying to use an advanced function of email; forget about the fact that I had explained that we still had issues; disregard the fact that every moment I spend answering his demanding emails is another moment that I am prevented from working on the issue at hand. The only thing that mattered was that Napoleon was inconvenienced.
After a couple of hours of troubleshooting, the problem was isolated and fixed… only to create yet another problem. I felt like I was playing dominoes. Yet again, notifications trickled in that there were problems… nobody though, was as abrupt or demanding as Napoleon. Fortunately, I was able to quickly identify this follow-up problem, and I could fix the problem for individuals who were immediately impacted, and then go back and fix everyone else programmatically. I finally solved that last problem at about 3:30, and we all had the project finished up by 4:30 or so, allowing me to send out a communication to everyone at about 5:00 formally announcing that we were done.
Between Friday evening and now, I put in roughly 14 hours… my co-workers put in roughly 8 to 12 hours each. We planned for weeks and still encountered two major issues that even in retrospect couldn’t have been foreseen and avoided based on our level of expertise, yet we solved each problem quickly, based on that same measurement of expertise. We missed aspects of our deadline by a bit, but we busted ass and did a great job, finishing the entire project early. In spite of that, what sticks out in my mind is Napoleon’s email saying that our work was unacceptable…
No matter how good you do, no matter how hard you try, it’s never enough.
Knowing that our project would take a while, we decided to do the work over the weekend, so that our users would have as little downtime as possible. We sent out the announcement to everyone - several days ahead of time - saying that we’d be starting promptly at 5:00 Friday, that we’d be down all night Friday, and that we’d be continuing this work through the weekend. We clarified that we planned to have basic functionality restored by midnight Friday, but that certain aspects, such as distribution lists, might be down until Monday morning.
The first complication hit before our project even started. At 4:30, the point where I had planned on doing final preparation for the project, one of my other servers crashed. I spent the next 25 minutes getting that server up and running again, which only left me five minutes for my last-second prep work. Forty-five minutes later – almost a full hour after our announced start time – one of my co-workers told me that she had numerous workers still using email. She ran around frantically reminding them of our planned work, which set us back further.
Finally, after about an hour, we began our work in earnest. Old connections were deleted, new connections were made, the most efficient methods of communication were recalculated, and we waited… and waited… and waited. Two of the three connections weren’t working. After an hour or so on the phone with my guru at corporate headquarters, we finally figured out the problem, reconfigured the non-functional connections, and waited some more. In short order, the basic functionality was restored, so I sent out an email saying that people could use basic email again, and that we’d continue work in the morning. I went to bed around midnight, after a 16 hour day.
My co-workers and I had planned on picking up the work at around 9:00, but my boss called me at about 8:45 and told me there were problems. I verified the issue and immediately started working on a solution. At 9:00 one of the VPs (I’ll call him Napoleon, because he’s a little man who wields a large corporate sword), emailed my boss and me, screaming because his email didn’t work, telling us that this was unacceptable, and demanding to know when it would be fixed. Never mind the fact that he was trying to use an advanced function of email; forget about the fact that I had explained that we still had issues; disregard the fact that every moment I spend answering his demanding emails is another moment that I am prevented from working on the issue at hand. The only thing that mattered was that Napoleon was inconvenienced.
After a couple of hours of troubleshooting, the problem was isolated and fixed… only to create yet another problem. I felt like I was playing dominoes. Yet again, notifications trickled in that there were problems… nobody though, was as abrupt or demanding as Napoleon. Fortunately, I was able to quickly identify this follow-up problem, and I could fix the problem for individuals who were immediately impacted, and then go back and fix everyone else programmatically. I finally solved that last problem at about 3:30, and we all had the project finished up by 4:30 or so, allowing me to send out a communication to everyone at about 5:00 formally announcing that we were done.
Between Friday evening and now, I put in roughly 14 hours… my co-workers put in roughly 8 to 12 hours each. We planned for weeks and still encountered two major issues that even in retrospect couldn’t have been foreseen and avoided based on our level of expertise, yet we solved each problem quickly, based on that same measurement of expertise. We missed aspects of our deadline by a bit, but we busted ass and did a great job, finishing the entire project early. In spite of that, what sticks out in my mind is Napoleon’s email saying that our work was unacceptable…
No matter how good you do, no matter how hard you try, it’s never enough.
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