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!