Under Management

I recently had the opportunity to hire a new employee. One of my system administrators quit (on good terms) and I needed to fill the position before our busy season started. This would be the first time I  hired someone. After pushing out the job requisition for severals weeks, I had a dozen or so applicants. 

I filtered through the job applicants based upon their wage requirements, location, and skills. But this was all based off email correspondence with them and reviewing their resumes. I then filtered down the group to about 10 or so applicants. I had a favorite and invited them up to the job site to get a tour and meet the staff. I spent an entire day touring the applicant around, telling them about the company, and the job itself. But I didn't call his references before having him come onsite. 

We recently had to install a new SAN device because our old SAN was at it's EOL and support was beginning to become too expensive. Unfortunately, my team and I have no experience with installing  SAN devices but we foolishly thought we could figure it out. We now need the new SAN device online because the old SAN is out of service, but we have been unable to implement because we are not familiar with SAN installations. Worst than that - it has caused us several network and power management issues within it's rack.

A month or so ago I ordered a new SAN to replace one of our aging systems for 40K. The package arrived on two small pallets and we moved them to a staging area to prepare for installation. Unfortunately the SAN installation project was postponed due to other important projects that came up. 

After several other projects were completed - we went back to tackle the SAN installation project. We get the SAN racked (which was entire issue about rack management) and we discover that we are missing some critical cables for the installation! The vendor never shipped them. The project is now in a time-sensitive position because the old SAN is going to fall out of support. I frustratingly contact the vendor and they send us new cables, but another blunder occurs where they send them ground instead of overnight. We are now severely behind on this project and it is impacting other projects because I didn't check the contents of the package when it arrived.

I recently made an order of 80k for a hardware refresh to replace many of our aging systems on our network and maintain our technology lifecycle. The order was comprised of both laptops and desktops. The vendor requested current specs on our current systems to build out systems that would be similar.

I received a quote and pushed the order through to get the systems purchased. We received multiple pallets, just as I suspected. I got one of my support administrators imaging and deploying the machines. 

During the deployment I come to find out that all the laptops purchased only have 4GB of RAM, when I really needed them to have 8GB. All the desktops have 8GB though. Foolish me for not reading the quote and knowing what I had ordered and what I had needed.

I also find that I ordered laptop bags for all the laptops! What! I didn't need these. Oh well, I'll play it off like I meant to order them.

The story behind this lesson is what comes with custom-freelance development work as opposed to having a company do custom development work for you. We operate a large POS system that interfaces with an ecommerce solution to sell the majority of our products online. Unfortunately the vendor supplied ecommerce solution didn't work for our needs so we hired a third-party, freelance developer to build us a custom ecommerce solution to interface with our POS system.

The solution was built and deployed two years ago - it was what we needed then, but now new bugs have arisen and we need additional feature enhancements. But since we were working with a freelance developer without a support contract - we get limited responses from him on the work we need done. 

The developer responds to emails and phone calls when it's convenient to him and when the work requests aren't too much of a burden on him. If  troubleshooting takes 30 minutes, he'll respond. But if it's going to take an hour or more of development work - forget it. It's not that we aren't willing to pay him either, we'll pay him to fix bugs and develop new features.