Putting the Cart Before the Horse - IT(Business) Practices that are just backwards
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So I figured (and with some people egging me on) here's as good a place as any for examples of the Cart being put before the horse.
Examples of where Businesses and IT Departments alike are doing things backwards. A very simple example would be purchasing equipment before knowing how it's going to be used, or without getting appropriate advice from an expert.
Another example might be trying to protect from an employee leaving the company, and a vital company function being left vacant without any documentation, so the immediate thought is "I must hire someone to learn and act as a backup in case this person leaves"
In both cases above the cart (the end goal) is to improve the business, which oddly isn't following any common sense process. Which in both cases involve speaking to people, documenting the desired business goal, and forming a process to achieve said goal. All of which is the "horse".
By building solid company documentation that can be presented to anyone coming in off of the street, the business can maintain its self. It can continue to function even if any person in the organization wins the lottery and up and quits.
By planning and discussing the business goals with professionals for any project, the company is likely to save money while having a much better final product; be it a server infrastructure or what have you.
By blindly saying "We need X, implement it" or having managers who say things like "Do your job" or "make it work" the Cart is literally being placed in front of the horse. No matter what you do from this point on, the end product will be cobbled together, and difficult to correct.
Here is an example of a company that has put the cart in front of the horse. Sadly the person would like to remove the topic. But to get the subject across the business purchased equipment before consulting anyone, saying we need "this". Which isn't bad, but it was immediately followed up with a purchase.
Said purchase could easily have saved the company a good amount of money with proper planning.
Always plan first, discuss whats needed, build a "model" and punch holes at it.
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Above all, don't get offended with other people who think differently than you rip your idea to shreds and send you back to the drawing board.
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One you have your model, goal, and have punched holes at it, should you then consider your purchasing options.
If you're looking at a server, and say "OMG this is the best thing ever" without an appropriate plan to use the server, you're literally done for. The sharks (sales people) don't have a thing to do, you're their meal ticket.
Even if that server will work for your needs, it doesn't mean its not overkill or utter-crap because you might not actually know what you need.
As @dafyre said, if you come to a community of professionals, who in no way owe you anything, asking for help, or the best way to rectify a situation, don't get upset if the responses seem crass.
Sometimes a crass response such as "return it all" is the only appropriate answer.
Other times, people might offer advice to use what's already been purchased in a much better / safer / wiser solution than you've thought about.
Different perspectives as we aren't in your shoes.
For all intensive purposes, we're free online consultants. Offering the best advice we can on the limited information you've provided us.
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And don't get offended when it wasn't even you that made the mistakes. Giving the IT guy, that was brought in after the fact, the tools necessary to make his decisions and how to talk to management shouldn't be offensive in any way. That's ridiculous. He wanted everything to be candy coated for some reason, it wasn't even his fault (he claims, but I kind of doubt that.) But everything in that thread was information that he needed to understand what was done and what to do about it now.
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Here is one: Putting Lots of Giant iSCSI into RAID 5 Behind File Server. Guy didn't buy anything, it's all mental. But he let the solution lead him rather than the goal. He started with a goal and immediately didn't know how this was normally tackled, made a weird technical assumption and because of that bizarre assumption he got sidetracked and totally lost sight of the goal and was letting his assumed solution drive his thinking and ended up with something that would not support any goal and was bordering on crazy. You can kind of see where he would have started out reasonable, made one little mistake, forgot the assumed solution versus goal and off the rails he went.
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I know I'm dragging a topic up from the past, but here is a topic where a business has made a purchase with the goal of Shoe horning 16tb (4x4TB) HDD's into ProLiant MicroServer G7 Server.
Wasted money, with clearly no concept of what is an appropriate way of setting something like this up.
