5. GoGoogle!!!

So we flipped the switch on Friday at 5PM and off we went.

There are a couple things I want to mention leading up to this to kind of reinforce some of the points made previously.

I received a panicked e-mail from one of my Schleprocks at 4:45 on Friday indicating that she just found out about the system change at 4PM and was wondering why we were doing it and when Information Systems staff was going to move everything over for her.

Information Systems staff made several laps around our headquarters building on both Thursday and Friday asking folks if they had any questions or concerns.

Once we confirmed the change was made for our mail records, we started monitoring traffic to the Google system.  We worked with the vendor to make sure things were functioning properly behind the scenes for about 90 minutes.  Everything seemed groovy.

4. Don’t Panic

OK, so we are now two days from our go live date!  Yay!  Scary stuff.

Technical Perspective

Now is the time when you try to remember what you forgot and forget what you remembered.  In short, it’s “what if” time.  What if this happens?  What do we do?  How do we do it?  Who do we call?  How do we communicate it to users?  You want everything to go exactly as planned, but it rarely does.  Things are forgotten along the way, thus, the trying to remember what you forgot.  Not recalling everything you did each step of the way and every decision you made on a project constitutes the forgot what you remembered reference.

Despite implementing new tech projects for nearly 20 years now, there’s always that anxiety as you lead up to the go live for me.  These last few days to stew until things actually change are tougher for me than the planning and after go live.  I love the conversations with staff and vendors that go into system development and setup.  I love the training phase.  And, since I long ago accepted that things will go wrong on every project, I’m okay with scrambling for a while after go live to rectify any situations that occur.  It’s the whole remembering what we forgot and forgetting what we remembered that gets to me.

Staff Perspective

So, two days out and more training to occur today.  Staff perspective falls into three general categories:  Yay!  Huh? and Why me?

Yay!

Usually, these are the folks most directly involved in the project.  They have been in from the start and realize the opportunity that new systems provide.  In most cases they evangelize, the project to their co-workers and it turns into a Breck commercial for most of the organization.

Huh?

These are the people in your organization, that never read anything that is not directly relevant to them and are thus unaware that there is a change that will take place.  Despite best practices in communication to staff on the project, some folks are still unaware of what exactly is going to happen when we go live.  These people have obviously not read the repeated announcements or watched the entertaining videos about Going Google!  Shocking, right?  These are the users that are in a panic this close to go live because they don’t know what’s going on and have not done anything proactively to prepare for go live.  This is the most aggravating of the three groups here to both the co-workers and IT staff.

Why Me?

If you remember the Flintstones, you may remember Bad Luck Schleprock.  Everything bad always happened to him and he was more than happy to tell you all about it.  Schleprock would be the nom de technologie I would give this group.  Three major subgroups are the “we’ve always done it this way” folks, the people in your org that complain about everything and the “I’m afraid of computers” gang.  I’ve written off the complainers (white noise) and the “we’ve always done it this way” folks.  There’s no helping the latter group because they just don’t want to be helped.  I love the “I’m afraid of computers” folks because there’s still hope for them and many of them, while afraid of computers, secretly want to learn more about them.  These are the folks that, if you help them use computers on one project their use of computers, will improve in all instances where they use computers.