Change Management Horro Stories

UKVIKING · Posted: Thu Feb 14, 2008 7:12 pm Post subject: Change Management Horro Stories

Folks,

Any thoughts about have a list of the Horror stories about poorly planned / implemented changes

This will help any one use them to provide ammo for having good change mgmt

News stories but no link

The latest one is Blackberry upgrade in US ... giggle
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John Hardesty
ITSM Manager's Certificate (Red Badge)

Change Management is POWER & CONTROL. /....evil laughter

Ed · Posted: Thu Feb 14, 2008 9:18 pm Post subject:

What about the stories that came from the British Government putting in a brand new system, and it cost double the estimate and didn't work. This was in the mid 80s. This is why we now have ITIL!!!!!

Also look at the problems for the Passport service, fairly recently, when they put in a new system. This gave all sorts of problems

Regards

Ed

Ed · Posted: Thu Feb 14, 2008 9:23 pm Post subject:

Another story was the Inland Revenue cock-up in 2000 (See BBC news 01/03/2000) Passport foul up was in 1999, heaps of others

Regards

Ed

mg10_86 · Itiler Joined: Jan 21, 2008 Posts: 21 Location: Canada

Canada's gun registry system.

Estimated cost $119 million. Actual cost $2 billion.

This is in Canadian currency, which is now in parity with the US dollar.

Ines · Newbie Joined: Mar 21, 2006 Posts: 18

Then there is Melbourne's (Austalia) "MYKI" public transport smartcard system, looking to be implemented at least 2 years late, and "..The system will cost about $1 billion, not the $494 million figure the Government has been using..."

Skinnera · Senior Itiler Joined: May 07, 2005 Posts: 121 Location: UK

So I don't think any of these are Change (RFC) horror stories... these are just examples of badly run projects aren't they...?

I've been expecting to see things like allowing 2 Major Changes to go ahead on subsequent days to the systems that were central to an organisation's online and retail stores respectively and them both going badly wrong, and only at that stage it becoming obvious that the backout plans were badly flawed and interdependant... Crying or Very sad

If that had really happened ( Embarassed

) the effect would have been to cripple both sales channels for about 4 days and it came about because the compound risk wasn't assessed properly - only the individual risk of each Change activity.

I'd further imagine that it would have lead to a significant bollocking for the Change team (and Head of...) swiftly followed by an equally significant revamp of how Major Changes were assessed and signed off...

UrgentJensen · Posted: Tue Feb 26, 2008 8:11 pm Post subject:

Morning,

In my experience the worst CM related stories are when a major change is planned and looking good, but shortly afterwards it becomes apparent that all is not well.

For example, once we were having a data centre power down and whilst that was going ahead a couple of the network guys thought it would be the ideal time to upgrade the config on the core switch. Trouble is that switch was single point of failure and the entire company completley disappeared off the radar for a while.

Oh, and this is my favorite: Due to pressures a customer on a poorly run project I found that one of the techs had decided he couldn't wait for slot to be allocated in the server room for his new box and we found out a while later that he'd put it live... lying on the floor in a closet. With four other servers stacked on top. F&*king unbelievable.

Oh the trials and tribulations...

UJ
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Timo · Posted: Wed Feb 27, 2008 7:21 am Post subject:

How about going from ITIL v2 to v3? Wink

UKVIKING · Posted: Wed Feb 27, 2008 7:27 am Post subject:

ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

running screaming from the room
_________________
John Hardesty
ITSM Manager's Certificate (Red Badge)

Change Management is POWER & CONTROL. /....evil laughter

elewis33 · Posted: Wed Apr 02, 2008 5:15 am Post subject:

OhioScott · Itiler Joined: Oct 29, 2007 Posts: 26

New CIO forced through a mainframe patch from his former employer (IBM) over the objections of not only the Change Manager but also the Mainframe Support Team because the patch had not been tested.

Patch brought down the mainframe... luckily it was inside the maintenance window on a Saturday night so they were able to recover. CIO then forces through a quick and dirty fix from IBM to the patch on Sunday afternoon again over the objections of all involved. Result was that the mainframe is knocked out for 3 business days for a Fortune 100 insurance company.

Blame fell on the IT organization as a whole for failing to meet our customer's availability service levels while the CIO was not held accountable for any of the error. He used the situation to highlight inadequacies within our disaster recovery processes to gain a bonus from the board of directors!

Doober · Itiler Joined: Apr 04, 2008 Posts: 30

DYbeach · Posted: Fri Jun 20, 2008 4:35 pm Post subject:

UKIT · Itiler Joined: Sep 26, 2007 Posts: 36 Location: England

With reference to datacentre issues,such as lack of space,power and cooling issues.This is an area that appears to be always suffering from lack of management,having worked for some leading IT companies over the past 10 years or so.With server's being smaller than ever but drawing significantly more power than they predecessors the upgrading of the datacentre's infrastructure is achieved through re-active rather than proactive measures in some cases.


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