Well, tonight as you may know I participated in a phone system upgrade for my 300-person office. Since the Telecom department consists of 3 people including me, we had hired consultants to do most of the work for us. My boss researched to find the best ones around, and let me tell you, it was awesome.

Our group did a lot to prepare for the upgrade, most involving creating disgusting spreadsheets describing what every singe one of our phones did in what circumstances, what lines rang where, etc. It took a while and certainly wasn’t pretty, but the end result was a concise description of all of our phone lines we could hand over to our consultants.

They did the legwork and the staging, and tonight was the big night. We activated the new phone system and took the old one offline, and it worked. It worked right away. Immediately.

We spent the rest of the night drinking beer in the office and making sure that all of the special cases were taken care of appropriately. We just have to tie up loose ends and test test test.

But, my hat is off to our awesome consultants, who literally made the biggest project I’ve ever looked at seem like not only a walk in the park, but more like a walk in the park with some good friends and a couple of open containers!

Now we just have to hope that the end users feel the same way we do on Monday!