What Drives Your Business?

It's an age-old question, what drives your business? Are you quality conscious? If so, how dedicated are you to providing a high quality product or service to your customers?

Thankfully, we have seen the American consumer become more quality conscious, which translates into businesses upping their standards in response. Of course, everyone wants the best quality at the lowest price, but most can accept that such desires are often at odds with one another.

In a management position, we're often faced with how much quality we will decide on providing for a certain function. Of course, some corners can be cut at certain times to increase our profits.

In the technical world, the same issues arise.

Not too long ago, I was involved in an effort to merge two companies. This entailed migrating all the servers/firewalls/network machines necessary for the service to run to another location. We had the weekend (starting Friday) to get the network moved and functioning all over the course of the weekend. Really, the goal was to get everything going Friday and then put out small fires Monday morning as we incorporated some of the internal processes into the new setup.

My first inkling of concern came when dealing with some of the other company's IT staff members. They were professional, but they seemed rather rushed. The plan was to setup the machines at their site, and then have their firewall pass through to the network we were migrating to them.

While this sounded good in theory, it really didn't play out well in the real world. We never did get that plan working, although we tried for much of Friday evening and night. Saturday, the idea arose that we should just setup the migrated network with it's own access to the internet, thus bypassing their firewall. Thankfully, it worked.

Although the clients didn't lose access to the service for more than 36 hours, the situation was reaching emergency pitch, and yet, there was no training for this emergency, no procedure, just trusting that thinking on your feet can pull you through. While it may make great television, it can wreak havoc on the systems of the people going through it.

So, what could we have done better to avoid this mad scramble? While there are several things that could have been changed, I can think of two things that would have dramatically improved the migration:

More Testing
More Time

I think it would have been wise to try and think through a more safe migration approach than the "all or nothing" plan we went with. If we could have setup a test network scenario at the new site, and then took the time to get things setup to whatever network plan we wanted, the transition would have been much easier on everyone. A safer approach may have been possible had our time not been very limited. At some point though, as professionals, we need to let management know when we need more time in order to get things done properly. While this may be difficult, our employers will be much happier with a working solution that took longer than a non-working solution that took less time. Of course, there's a balance, we can't take forever to perfect a product or service - we'd go out of business.

Quality need not only be our standard toward our clients/customers but toward our everyday processes and employees. Employees generally want to be proud of their work, and want to be safe. In the end, quality conscious IT management and coding makes clients happier as well as IT personnel.