Jesse Freese
As I said in the introduction article we moved the office this summer and I took on responsibility for moving the phones and internet service myself. I had moved these several times before so I had experience with it and I had all the information I needed to make it a smooth transition. It is not as simple a task as you might think:
- There is the company that provides our fax, local and long distance phone service.
- There is the big phone company that provides the phone lines to the building and our DSL lines (office and home).
- There is the company that provides our domain hosting, internet (office and home) and email capability.
- And finally there is the "phone guy" who sets up our phone system in the office and connects everything from all the other companies to make everything work.
So you would think that with a good understanding of the task that I would have little problem with the task execution. The problem came in the form of what you might call scope change. Coincidently, about 1 month prior to the move and just about the time I needed to start executing my task I was contacted by another phone/internet company who wanted to give us a proposal for providing our phone and internet service. We were very happy with and really liked our long-time current providers but I figured I would at least listen to their offer. Their offer was very tempting. They promised that our service and capability would remain unchanged, and because we would only have to deal with one company rather than two, our monthly charge would be less and to top it off, we would avoid a "move" fee from our current providers because they would waive the setup fee as a new customer.
Even with all the benefits I was having a tough time making the decision to switch. As I analyzed the decision I was running out of time to make the switch with our current providers and given the guarantee to switch us back if we were not satisfied with the new provider, I made the decision to switch to the new provider. Many in the organization questioned the decision because they really liked the current providers (support) and I was not confident that I made the right decision.
The move went very well and the phones and internet were switched and up and running the first day. But we couldn't receive faxes and we discovered we still needed our "old" internet provider for our internet to work from our homes. There were other problems with little things that didn't work quite as well as with the old providers like email spam. After trying to make things work in the first month without success we were able to invoke the guarantee (with much difficulty) and have now successfully moved everything back to our old providers and everything is working perfectly.
So what did I learn from this experience? I relearned two things and both are intangible. The first one is related to procurement and evaluating proposals. Even though the proposed provider was going to save us money, the intangible factors of current and long-time excellent service and excellent support were not considered in the procurement decision. They should have been considered and been given more than enough "weighting" to compensate for any cost savings.
The second learning was to trust my intuition more (again intangible) as I believe it was telling me not to switch providers even though the numbers were saying "yes". If I had used/listened to either one of these intangibles I would have saved all of us at Fissure a lot of pain.
Jesse Freese
