The bigger the organization the longer things will take to get done, but eventually they do get done. You may have heard stories about the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing, and indeed that can and does happen, but sometimes there is misinformation and obstruction for political ends.
One such example was the rollout of a new Microsoft product as a company standard tool. It had been decided to sunset the old groupware product and use this product. There was of course a timetable that everyone should be trying to meet.
There are a couple of ways to rollout new functionality within a company. You can be first and face all the teething issues, you can wait and hope that all the teething issues are discovered and thus have an easier time, or you can be cynical and see if the product will be canceled or reduced in scope.
The problem with being first is that unless your departments usage is the simplest case, you may have problems and the company may not (yet) have the expertise to solve them. Depending on the circumstances you may be working with other consultancies or even other large cloud solution firms who had at least two or three addition levels of support who can hopefully solve your problem.
We were lucky enough to have other consultancies and other fortune 500 firms involved in this new cloud solution. The cost for a single iteration including the internal evaluation, external evaluation and rollout of the farm solution would feed a normal employee for one or two months. As there were lots of these farm solutions at the company I guess it was getting costly to keep this up. So management made the decision to have a six month freeze of all farm solutions that were not live. In three weeks, any solution that was not live would be thrown out and the acceptance process would start all over again middle of next year.
This is a real bummer to say the least as we have been fighting with configuration of our farm solution for months. Our consultants show that the solution works on their servers, the real problem is with our company’s internal networking and security.
We found out about this with only 9 days until the freeze, and when my boss found out he was understandably concerned that he had not heard about this. When he confronted his boss about this he was told that, with a rather sheepish grin, there was no communication budget for this topic that is why he did not send out an email about it.
Well, part of the problem was that his boss was a real idiot who should never have been promoted to a manager position.