28 hours without any sleep and still counting.... Thousands of pissed off users. Not a great day in my world. I suppose I should be content that everything that I was responsible for worked fine but I hate being associated with a project that fails so miserably...especially when it would have been very simple for things to go smoothly.
Backing up a bit, we went live with a metadirectory project at midnight last night. Unfortunately, 4000+ AD accounts ended up having their password set to the password from one of the other connected systems. This might have been ok had it been planned to work that way. Alas, a ton of users came in the morning and couldn't logon to their desktops. On top of that, the communication plan didn't get sent out to the IT staff until late last week and some of them never forwarded it on to the users that they are responsible for.
Needless to say, I am quite pissed off right now. I like to fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants as much as anyone but there are some projects that have to be carefully coordinated and tested before you implement them. Anything that has the potential to delete/create/disable accounts and sync passwords would seem to fit that criteria. It is especially annoying because I kept pushing for the project to get pushed back 2 weeks because a ton of last minute changes were being made. Never a good thing. And 2 weeks would have been plenty of time to do everything properly. This project was on hold for almost 2 years...is 2 more weeks going to kill you? Plus, a couple of us kept saying that we needed to get our communication out to everyone much sooner so it could be reviewed and disseminated as needed. End result, tons of users that called in hadn't even heard that a major change was coming.
Anyway, I'm tired and pissed off and I think I'll take a day off. The scary thing, this is only phase 1...the next phase will have a lot more impact. I hope they have learned their lessons on this one. I've been doing this IT crap for 12 years or so now and I'm sad to say that this is the most disappointed I have ever been in a large-scale project that I was a key member on. I'm a bit frustrated with myself because I *knew* it was going to go badly. I should've raised a bigger stink about the concerns that I had.