PERSONAL: And it all falls into place

June and July have been extremely busy as we geared up for a major software release to ALL our wool industry clients. Long days, heaps of careful planning and some clever deployment. But now the hard work is about to be put to the test… our software goes live at 5am Monday morning (24 July).
So far it is all looking good (I’ll even be heading off early tomorrow – Friday – to have a reasonably relaxed weekend)… but by this time next week we’ll know for sure.

I’m always a little nervous when these upgrades come around. Last year we botched it big time, and the release had a few major bugs that caused a stack of grief. At that time we swore we’d never go through that again. So, from January this year we’ve been planning, coding, testing and preparing deployment of the release. And now it is out there, ready for switchover on Monday…
I should explain that we are talking about some pretty big systems here – we write enterprise broking and trading packages that are the backbone of some big companies – these are not little applications. And that’s why I’m nervous. Compounding this is the fact that ‘the industry’ dictates that it all has to switchover at once – no staggered deployment to a few companies at a time. Part of the reason for this is that the entire EDI network running the wool industry in Australia, New Zealand and South Africa changes as part of the changeover.

So, why am I blogging about this now? Why not wait until after the changeover and then report (ahem gloat) about how well it went? Well, mainly because I want to make myself accountable. If the changeover is a balls up, then I’ll be inclined to not even mention it (like last year). But I want to mention it no matter what. I want to discect it either way – understanding what went right and what didn’t. So, stay tuned for the wash up…