A Confederacy of Dunces

[canyonwalker]

Day 1 of the POC project I'm doing in SF this week started slowly. Late last week I tried to confirm that they had their VMs ready for us to install stuff into. Turns out they had the systems ready but they have brutally restrictive firewalls in place. How do they expect to evaluate a tool with redundant application servers if a) the servers can't

Comments

pre-POC checklist?

[ojuang]

Next time, have a list of ports that need to be available and tell the customer to have holes in the firewall?
Not that it will happen, but it will make you look better if you have that list and give it to them ahead of time. The dunces will still fail to do it, or better yet, only do some of them.

[canyonwalker]

Very familiar with pre-POC checklists. Used one here but customer failed to confirm it in advance. Head of sales said "damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!" because he senses end-of-quarter business. Turns out customer was actually about 90% ready. Firewall was the one significant thing they hadn't seen to. I knew going in it could've been worse. Head of sales knew, too, thankfully.