Keeping an eye on projects
As a service manager, one of your jobs is to protect your customers from change. It should be invisible to them as much as possible unless it's something they purposefully requested, or a major improvement to the user experience.
Inevitably though, there will at some point be a change that impacts them. This happened to one of my customers recently. They are not one of the most technically proficient teams (although I might add that they are extremely effective at the job they are employed to do!) One of the services they use is located on a server that's accessed via RDP. The server changed location and a second factor of authentication was added. It was a relatively minor change for the IT teams but it took nearly the whole day to get them onto the new server.
This wouldn't have happened if I'd known the change was happening. It was bundled in with a larger maintenance update, the rest of which I knew wouldn't affect any of my customers. If I had known, I would have ensured there was a step-by-step user guide for them to follow.
So, lesson learnt, I will pay greater attention to the scope of projects from now on, even those ones I assume will not affect my customers.
- Previous: Awesome Tools - Semantic Versioning
- Next: Conflict
