You disagree that sometimes IT projects are pushed to go live without adequate testing?
Yes, people outside of IT have little idea what it really takes to do this right nor do they typically have enough foresight to see the consequences of something failing. That's why I said "Shame on their IT leadership" for failing to understand that this was not ready and failing to communcate it.
What I suspect, having been through many of these projects and having seen them done, is that someone set a deadline to say "go live on 7/15" and they did it because the project manager has an addiction to food, clothing and shelter and missing the deadline would have threatened his addiction.
Sorry, I should have snipped. This is what I disagreed with:
"This isn't abnormal...it might be wrong, but it happens far more often than you'd expect. "
In the theme of this thread, complete hash-ups in IT happen very infrequently. And in my abstract, I wanted to express that I do this kind of stuff 6-10 times per year, and yet no one even knows it's happening. When things go horribly wrong, and planes don't fly, or stocks don't get traded, the game locks up, it makes the news. That's why they call it news, because it is rare.
I'm sure that schedules slip, I'm sure that costs overrun, I'm sure that projects do not always go the way they were first intended. I could write a book on the delta between what customers want, and what they say they want. When I do the network part of the deal, I ask customers in a project planning meeting not about speeds and feeds, cause that's my job. I ask them about bulk stuff. How many hits per hour? How many transactions per hour? What is the cost of a delay of 1 second? 30 seconds? 1 minute? 1 hour? Some apps can handle things, some can't. Some customers expect instant interaction(gaming), others won't run a pull and ship until 7PM each night. I have to figure out the speeds a feeds so that everyone gets served(literally).
The gen pop has no idea how this all knits together, with border gateways, routing policies, shadow apps, embedded apps, platform specific architectures, and now the "cloud', which is in the industry we consider an acronym(Can't Locate Or Use Data). None of you know about a major 3 letter company that had a massive network outage a few days ago. No one outside the community would believe what primitive systems a major bank uses. It amazes me that we don't have more meltdowns like AOPA.
