When it comes to moving to new hardware, the work is managed by the project manager and executed by the systems admin for the most part. And with a little luck if the architecture hasn’t changed, all will go according to the project managers plan. This is the way that things are supposed to work anyway, one of the things that seems to catch the project managers out, is the users unerring ability to throw a spanner in the works by forgetting to pass on some piece of vital information until the last minute.

Why, it seems to be broken!

So as to make the transition as simple as possible, the users should be involved in the migration process as much as is possible. Now this brings some benefits to the process, the project manager has to engage with the users. And as a result he has less time to engage with the system admins, from a systems admins point of view this is a win win situation. The drawback with this scenario is that the project manager will accept the facts as stated by the users, generally the project mangers aren’t bright enough to work things out for themselves and will accept whatever the user tells them.

Now the project that I’m involved in, is the relocation of all the applications to a new data center. Although the architecture isn’t going to change, the users are feeding the project management team a line based on testing the applications and the systems extensively. This as you can imagine is pushing out the timeline for the project, the need for testing was there at the beginning of the project but as the first few applications have been moved the type of testing should have changed from full end to end testing to performance evaluation testing. As we get further into this project the workload will rise and the timescales will becom tighter, having to test each application from end to end will cause further delays.