Disaster Averted: An Impossible Project Succeeds – BGLS5E2

In this Episode

• We went for a Big Bang Cutover and it wasn’t pretty
• Our project goals were defined poorly, and we paid the price
• We found out the hard way that low accountability leads to failure
• The tool we were using was great… for a completely different use case
• Our vendor had never taken on a challenge as big as us, and it showed

But we found a path to victory!

Transcript

Tom Cooper 0:00

Tom, the reality is this project will never work. We’re doomed. The political stuff that’s for the suits to solve not for me, if they hadn’t come up with such a bad idea to begin with, they wouldn’t have this problem at all stinks to be them.

Tom Cooper 0:21

Well, hello, and welcome to the second episode of the software horror stories podcast series from BrightHill group.

My name is Tom Cooper, and I’m your host.

We’ve just kicked off this series called Software horror stories where I’m sharing examples and lessons learned over the years about how projects succeed, and how they fail. In each episode, my goal is to use these stories to identify the things that blew up, why they blew up, and what you could do about it.

As I mentioned in the last episode, the coaching and training that I’ve been doing for the last few years has really focused on helping leaders of software teams do a better job of running those projects. And one of the things that really sticks out to me is so many times these projects have similar failures and similar challenges. Creating this podcast series as a way of helping make sure that we’re understanding the themes that hit us over and over again.

I recently came across a client that was struggling with managing user IDs, and it reminded me of a blast from my past. Over the years, my kids have often heard me say experience is what you get when you did not get what you wanted. Man did I get a lot of experience on this project!

Today’s episode covers the saga of a well intentioned organization seeking to solve a real and a painful experience.

It was an example of a solid business problem you would expect would be a great project to handle using software.

We all know that automation is a great way to reduce errors and increase the speed of routine and detailed processes. So you think that combined with all these great intentions, and the current pain of trying to find a solution manually, this project had all the markers of a great success, right?

I went and took on the job in this new department, I knew that we were working on automating user ID creation and deletion management.

It was true that the company had a growing problem keeping up with all the systems, all the passwords and all the users. Also, I knew this project had been going on for a couple of years, and there wasn’t yet a scheduled go live date.

Now, over the course of my career, I worked for that company for about 10 years. And I was about halfway through those years when I joined this project. And I gotta tell you, little did I know what I was getting into. So here we are a team trying to slay a dragon.

We had so many systems and so much employee turnover, we just could not keep up with creating and deleting these usernames and passwords. There was so much change, we were having trouble even recruiting enough people to activate and to shut down those accounts. And worse than that, there was no centralized system to manage IDs. And every application had its own store of usernames, password, password expiration, and password complexity policies, it was chaos, and it was getting worse every day.

So the company knew we had a problem. Abig one. In fact, because of the scope of this issue a couple of years before I joined the team, some bright person was tasked with finding a solution to managing identities in a multi vendor environment.

At that time, we had at