Yet another Phoenix failure
As many of you, some time ago I’ve finished reading The Phoenix Project and no, I won’t write yet another review how good or bad is this book. However, it seems there’re two camps around, one loves the novel, and one hates. If you still aren’t a camper of any, come and join us. Perhaps you’ll learn something or just waste yet another several hours, not for the first time. Come and be a camper!
I won’t write yet another review, but it seems there’re Phoenix projects everywhere or at least they look like such. Today is Monday and I wanted to do a bank transfer. No chance, it didn’t work. Such crucial bank service is not accessible all day and they still haven’t fixed it. Guess what, they performed a customer migration to a brand new platform with completely new UI, perhaps even better than the previous one. There’s just one thing, it doesn’t work. So I’ve tried to send a message through the system to tell them all the issues, but it also failed again and again.
They spent probably thousands of hours working on a new platform, invested time and money and when it came to delivery time, it just failed. Of course they say they’re familiar with these issues and the whole IT department is working on it, but that’s not the case while everything is burning. I mean, it mustn’t never happen, especially if it’s a bank and there’s money involved.
We all want to be IT professionals, but such things are still happening and I started pondering how come. Is it because of simple math and probability, because the internet now achieved the point it never been ever since and among thousands of online services, some of them must just fail? Is it because of the vast changes in IT so no one could understand it well? Is it because of IT people since they just don’t care? Finally, is it because of management pressure, because whatever is happening, the product must be delivered on time?
Such app failure is not just a problem to solve. The point is, the whole migration process has failed and from customer point of view, new product is completely unusable, no matter how it look like or how well it is designed regarding UX best practices. The business can’t operate with such product.
If you’re familiar with such situation, waste several hours and read The Phoenix Project.