Gregory's Server
Alright, things are moving faster now, so I might condense-toot to avoid pollution. C-Level is now aware that all the other departments involved were also aware, and that nothing was done, despite being… entirely aware.
Brief call from the CTO to vent first, and second apologise. Finance approved, expedited, a deployment plan is in place and the works are booked for two weeks today.
The fun part is what happens with the best part of 2000 users unable to do ANYTHING relating to the organisation.
The more fun part is the CTO is aware that in 8 days another batch of 400 machines will have the same fate, that everyone else is… wait for it… already aware.
I think this is the first time in my career I’ve been this close to a monumental clusterfuck of this scale… and not have any responsibility for it or to fix it. All we can do is observe.
It’s not Schadenfreude, it’s a bad situation and it’s not fun. I’m not sure there’s a word for this.
So, things have calmed down a bit. There’s currently a longer lead time than expected on the hardware order (I did chuckle a bit, I’ll admit).
There’s only so much shouting that can be done before everyone runs out of steam.
Many mumblings of “lessons learned” and “post mortem” - a bit early for that methinks!
For anyone wondering about the actual politics of this. The machines came to end of life about 12 months ago, and the company being a multi-billion dollar operation managed to eke out another year of manufacturer support. Mostly symbolic as they’re not exactly going to release custom firmware for a handful of devices. They then put a set-in-stone tombstone date on support. 12pm today.
The idea is that it allowed the org to stay compliant with its own (admittedly fantastic) security and compliance policies. As well as the audit req from some of its customers is for hardware to fall under manufacturer support/updates etc. This satisfied both Legal and Compliance.
So for a whole year, they knew this was coming.
But nobody wants all that additional spend, so close to year end. Departments bickering over who’s responsibility it was, who’s budget it came out of, and so on. So everyone dug their heels in, and we continued to shout “iceberg!” from the sidelines.
C-level delegated as they should and middle managers also did so in turn, as they should.
And everyone under them went silent. Not wanting to look bad, have higher spend, rock the boat etc. not realising the cost burden was about the same on all departments, as they had roughly the same share of old devices.
And here we are!
So, things have calmed down a bit. There’s currently a longer lead time than expected on the hardware order (I did chuckle a bit, I’ll admit).
There’s only so much shouting that can be done before everyone runs out of steam.
Many mumblings of “lessons learned” and “post mortem” - a bit early for that methinks!