So, when I joined Idetic (MobiTV) one of the tasks I was given was to create the new infrastructure for our new building in Emeryville. This has been an interesting and educational journey for me. I’ve always had my designs and ways of implementing systems, but I’ve come to respect the human aspect a lot more through this process. For any given resources I try to plan the best implementation/use of them, but then I discover that the very building blocks I was given were then swapped out or moved around significantly. (be watchful of any vendor, their job is to get you to sign that contract, after which their job is done, you need to fight for your goods after that point). I have found that you should never make any assumptions and clearly define any of the resources given to you. In my case, the blueprints given to me clearly definied a server room with two rows of racks, except they were the smallest footprint possible, and as such, when we discovered this, it turns out we cannot put in regular cabinets for our servers. I had to work back an forth sacraficing resources to some how recover a usable server room. In the end, the CEO (much to my relief) realized the massive limitations put upon the project and decided to tear down a wall and expand the server room (yay!). I am thankful that our CEO is an Engineer, and is quite realistic in technicial arena. Most other CEO’s would have looked at the costs and delays and just said “We’ll expand later”. (which can lead to numerous nightmares in logistics). As it stands, I now have a larger server room and a little more time to implement our telephone system (even though we got them to agree to a date that fell within our original move-in time).
Here is to “No more surprises”, and a successful move in. 🙂