Surprise!!!

I love surprises. Christmas morning I come downstairs and I get surprises from my fam. My birthday I get a surprise. Father's Day is usually good for a surprise. Generally I love surprises, but there is one time in which I don't like to be surprised.

I do not like to be suprised by new applications at work. This was recently the case. I attended a meeting in which the business told me that they had developed a new application to collect and process some specific information. I work with these people everyday. I consider myself to be more a part of their team than IT. But there we were, 5 of us sitting around a table on Friday afternoon talking about the new application that needed to go live on Monday morning.

These things are just the way things are. No matter how much you pound the pavement, no matter how much you are a part of the team, there are always going to be instances in which the left hand is doing its own thing. I was not happy on Friday, and I waited until Tuesday to say my piece. I didn't want my anger to get the better of me. Waiting until I was cooler and able to look at the issue more objectively was a good thing. I made strong arguments about the approach and the products that were selected. We all sat down again on Tuesday afternoon, in response to my email, and developed alternate strategies that are more likely to be successful.

But if you are in the business, don't surprise IT with a new, fully developed application. Make IT a partner during the development process. We have done this type of thing before and those lessons that we have learned are painful. Let us help you to avoid learning them yourself, the hard way.