Communication

Just a small rant, on communication, and how it's vital in any business.

There are a couple of things that are bringing this to mind. Yesterday, a deployment, of one of the major products of the company I work for, was supposed to happen. I say supposed to, because it didn't. Originally, it had been arranged for Monday, but due to not receiving sign off, it didn't actually happen. Hence, its deployment was cancelled. The PM appears to have been under the impression that we just slide deployments from day to day, holding in the resource to do them (not much) and to test them (the major bit), each day. This isn't what happens. And you don't arrange to do a deployment at 4:30pm, when the deployment is supposed to happen at 5pm. That's just not on. Not only that, but we need /clear/ documentation on what is being deployed. Not 'the war file from monday' After all, as the deployment was cancelled, we were never told which file was to be deployed. Grr. As is, we just didn't deploy. Didn't look too good for the IT department as we took the hit on saying 'no deployment', rather than the Project Manager.

Then there's today. We have some file storage off site, at a co-location facility. It's supposed to be working with some virtualisation hardware, so we have replication of important information. We've been waiting for the co-lo company to get it all configured for a fair time now, growing steadily less and less amused. Today, we got a mail telling us what the vpn addressable range would be, and asking if our normal range was still right. We confirmed this, assuming that they were just about to send us a quick plan for sign off. Nope. They were actually making the changes there and then. Then I got a mail saying the VPN was ready. So I reconfigured it, and tried to connect. No dice. They'd not finished configuring the servers, and hadn't bothered to tell us what the new IP addresses were. Not Amused. No 'we're just about to do this'. No 'vpn's ready, we're just finishing the servers'. No 'here are the new details of the servers'. That would have been far too easy, I'm sure.