This evening I went back to my office to work on a Project that kicks off next week. It’s a fairly large project in scope and my team is responsible for staging the project pieces into our ERP and PSA Solution. I specifically will own the Project setup in the Professional Services Automation platform and because this task will require a fairly large number of Tickets I’ll utilize C#.Net, SQL Server and the API that comes bundled with the PSA framework to automate the creation of all the Tickets. This will save my Company from having to manage that manually. We’ve performed this kind of work in the past, I’d estimate several thousand tickets to be the scope, so it’s something that we’re very familier with at this point.
This is an ideal Project for I.T. These are complex Tickets and template based automation will provide smooth entry with no room for error, provided good data is received. Using this approach we’ll easily save the Company over 200 hours of manual entry. We like that kind of ROI… 4-5 hours of Developer time is well worth that kind of productivity gain.
It turns out that I spent about 45 minutes prepping all of the information needed to stage this project in the Development environment where the latest version of the PSA Solution is running. We have not however declared this version good for Production thus it’s still in Development. We’re a small shop and extremely busy; we don’t have fulltime dedicated testers so it’s not uncommon for us to stretch-out a platform upgrade for a few weeks while we test it ourselves.
Naturally, you can probably see where this is going. I ran into a couple of project stopping bugs almost immediately. I was unable to load my Projects in the PSA. At this point I have to give my software provider until tomorrow to provide a solution or go straight to Production with my Project where we know that the environment is stable with a version that’s 9 Months running.
I won’t name the Vendor because that’s not really the point I’m making and they’ve actually proven to be a good partner that provides a really unique solution for our needs.
On this upgrade though, it’s borked and I’ll end up loading my Projects into Production without the benefit of loading them into my Development environment where I can iron out any changes and perform peer reviews with the other teams prior to going live.
It could be worse, at least I’m not faced with this problem in my Production environment and that’s really my point. I could have been stuck in the mud on a very large Project. We’re a small shop and we can’t afford to rush a Platform Upgrade to Production where business running stability exists until we’ve had time to fully system test it.
If you’re running a small I.T. shop you’re no doubt faced with the similar issues. Do you find that you’re taking a similar approach?