Challenges in your projects are bound to happen.
It’s not about how to avoid them, it’s about how to HANDLE them.
Recently, we were launching a new platform that needed a total redevelopment.
When we launched, there were some server issues as there was an unexpected load on the server which brought things down.
Instead of panicking and creating more chaos, our team managed to stay calm whilst still understanding the severity of the problem as it was a live site in a major launch.
We put together a plan of attack and isolated the problem to come to a solution as soon as possible.
This experience reminded me that it wasn’t about trying to avoid another problem like this happening again, given most of the time it’s unforeseen.
It’s about what attitude you and your team choose to adopt when a major challenge arises.
Devising the best way to handle issues is a blueprint that you can use for any other challenge that may occur in the future, and will help you bounce back as soon as possible.
Adopting the right attitude allowed us to fix the server issue in just half an hour.
So, the next time you’re faced with a challenge, remain calm and think logically about the best way you can handle it.
Remember a level headed approach will always yield the best outcome.
Video Transcript:
Hi guys, in today’s video, I wanna talk about a recent project that we were moving live with and it didn’t exactly go to plan. So it was about three months ago, we were finishing off some major upgrades for an existing website, and we’d done all of our QA checks on the staging and development environment. The client had had signed off on everything and was happy with the way things were looking and functioning and it was launch day. So it was time to deploy the changes and we’d scheduled in some time where there was low traffic on the live site to make sure that there wouldn’t be any sort of issues. If there was some unforeseen things and now in this circumstance, actually there was something we completely overlooked on the server. When we rolled things out, initially things looked fine and we were kind of happy that, you know, it was a major upgrade and it went well now there was something we missed on the server and this resulted in an outage for one part of the website.
And we at the start, obviously we’re a little bit stressed out because it’s natural to do so, but we have done a fair few rollouts in the last say eight or so years that we’ve been running the company. And in that time we’ve realized that, yeah, look, there are some times where accidents do it happen, but it’s not so much about the accident or the problem. It’s really about your perspective when those things happen. That matters the in the long run. Because if you say, give two people the exact same problem, they can have completely different outcomes. Purely based on their perspective. One person can be extremely stressed and think it’s the end of the world. Another person can think, okay, look, this is a way we’ve learned how not to do this in the future. We can add this to our checklist and it’s an opportunity for, for growth and will be a better team for coming together for it now.
Yeah, to me, it really just illustrated the importance of that. And in the end, our team did quite a good job. It only was about 15 minutes of downtime. The client was happy. No one was really affected by the change because we had a few ways to mitigate the risk, like such as doing the raw ’em out overnight and just having some back backups in place to easily roll back. If we weren’t able to solve the issue as quickly as we’d liked. So let me know below any thoughts about this and we’d love to hear from you. Thanks for watching. See you on the next one. Cheers.
