"What we have here is failure to communicate!"
As I stated in my last post (wow...over a month ago already?), I would like to talk about communication between departments for a moment. I know this gets away from SharePoint a bit, but is very important and does affect many SharePoint shops. I see a lot of companies who have split out their departments. They have seperate systems, database, and development departments or groups who all work on the same systems in different capacities. When this happens, politics and bureaucracy conspire to break down communications between these groups.
A case and point of this is where I was recently on site with a company who was migrating their SharePoint 2003 farm over to MOSS 2007. The group who owned SharePoint was responsible for admin and development of the SPS environment, but had to go through the DBA group to create new databases and manage backups. They had to go through the systems folks to work access and patches. The systems group also had a corporate policy for doing their patch management.
Because the company is so large and has so many servers, they patched by groupings of racks. They listed on a bulletin board what servers were being patched and when. Not only is this inefficient, it puts the responsibility of looking for patch schedules on the SharePoint admins. While I was on site with them, the systems folks patched their servers, which triggered some weirdness with the database, which impacted the SharePoint migration testing on the day of migration. Not good.
My point here is that because nobody was talking, bad things happened. This led to additional time and frustration trying to get everything sorted. And since the systems folks were so isolated from other teams in this case, added stress was caused as the migration rolled on. So it is very important that if you do have disjointed and uncommunicative departments of this nature, you should appoint someone (or a committee) that can act as the central communications hub and will facilitate getting the necessary coordination. If this isn't done, many long nights and some marathon internet sessions searchin Monster.com may insue. Cheers.
