In the twelve months to July, the four platforms most of this company works in changed more than three hundred times. We scheduled none of it. We were given advance warning of a minority, in release notes we had to go looking for, and we discovered the rest when somebody rang the service desk.
Three of those changes were expensive. A collaboration platform altered the default sharing behaviour of a feature over a weekend, and we found out on the Monday. A finance platform retired an export format with thirty days notice, and our month end reconciliation was built on it. And a redesigned interface was trialled on roughly a third of our users without anyone asking us, which produced a little over two hundred calls in two days, not one of which my team could resolve.
Our change management is serious and it governs changes we make. That was an adequate description of this estate for most of my career, and it is becoming a description of a shrinking corner of it.
The direction is not ambiguous. Three of our suppliers no longer sell a version you install anywhere. A fourth has stopped putting engineering into the one we still run. The ability to say that we will take that release in October, after the audit and before the seasonal peak, is being withdrawn from us product by product, and it is not coming back.
So we do the few things still available. One person spends two hours a week reading roadmaps and release notes across fourteen platforms and raising anything with operational consequence. We ask for advance notice of material change in contract terms now, and three suppliers agreed to thirty days while one declined outright, which told me something useful about that relationship. Where a preview tenancy exists we run one, tested by our own staff rather than watched in a supplier demonstration.
And I have stopped promising the business that a system will not change during its critical period, because I cannot honour that for software I do not host.
For most of my career the risk was software that never changed. That is no longer the risk.
– Serguey Shinder
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