Example of a failed change impacting a small business
I had a bad week!
Well not disastrous but it could have been. Since launching Goitil and also setting up this blog, I have been looking for a piece of low cost Service Desk software to recommend to clients. The starting point for those companies that are not “logging their incidents” will always be a simple spreadsheet. This will get the process working before the detail of the tool becomes a barrier. Anyway, I stumbled across what look like a “to good to be true” offer. A fully functioning piece of Service desk software that would cover 35 PC’s/User absolutely FREE. This was not share ware (which I normally avoid at all costs), but a reputable company which offered a full “costed” version if you had more than 35 PC’s or more than one resolver group BUT was prepared to put its product out there free of charge for small businesses. Anyway, I clicked on the box, downloaded the software and allowed it to install and bingo, there it was! A fully functional service desk tool, completely configurable and working. Great I thought. Then I shut down for the night………………
Rebooting the following morning was not as much fun. My laptop normally takes about 90 seconds from boot up to all applications up and running, anti virus activated and Outlook/ Internet explorer open. What happened this day was not good…. “Service Desk server engine initialising”………….. TEN MINUTES later my PC was running with the service desk application launched. I had no choice, it loaded on boot up! What had happened? The service desk tool was configured to treat my PC hard drive as a database server, so when the application started up (which is configured to do as part of the installation process) it went through a sequence of events which took ages. Needless to say once the application had loaded I carried out an uninstall and left some very angry feedback on the companies website feedback explaining that I was not happy that the product auto launched and that their was no information that told me this would take 10 minutes to load. So what had I done wrong? Well firstly I failed to evaluate the change correctly. I went gung ho full of the elation of finding this “dream software” without evaluating the risk and considering my back out option. Worse still, I did not even back up my data before installing it! I broke every single rule of good change management. I was lucky, the un-installation process seems to have left my PC clean with no remedial problems. This is a situation we can all find ourselves in. We have a piece of software and we just want want to get it installed.
OK, being realistic could I have done anything different? Well I don’t have a spare laptop, so I have no test environment or way of testing. I could have researched the application a bit more, maybe reading the .txt “read me file” or contacting the vendor and asking some questions. I definitely should have backed up my data, even if it was just onto a USB drive. By the way, the software did actually look really good! And I have had a phone call from the vendor re my feedback telling me how to stop the auto start on boot up but at the moment a want a period of clear running (another good practice) – when you back out a major change ALWAYS allow a good period of time to observe normal system performance before you carryout another change.
If you are planning a major system change ans would appreciate some help assesing the impact, why not contact us?
