Meeting Meetings who's got the meetings

So we decided to implement Voice Over IP (VOIP) at my work. Now mind you, we’ve never done this before. So we hired an outside consulting firm to help us learn how to do it. We decided to implement it in our own building before rolling it out to a new building that is coming on line soon. That way we can work out the kinks in the process an the only people we are affecting is ourselves.

To put thing into perspective for you… we run a huge network with over 150,000 nodes. There are quite a few buildings in our little organization. Okay so it’s not little. Anyway, we have meetings… lots of them. Mostly because this is not a corporation so each department has their own chief and you know what they say about too many chiefs….

Anyway back to my story. We wanted to do VOIP so each of the major players pitched their bit to us about how they were the best… blah, blah, blah… anyway Cisco won. So we ordered all the shit that they needed… then we hired their reseller/consulting group, for right now I’m just going to call them C, to come out and teach us how to set this up.

Fast forward to a month later. All the stuff is installed and we are hooking them all up together. For the most part C has come in and done most of the work and hasn’t really given us any knowledge transfer. They are making a ton of assumptions based on corporations that they have installed similar setups for. However we are not a corporation so most of the assumptions are wrong. We assumed some things on our end too, so now we are both making asses out of ourselves.

Now it’s coming down to crunch time. We wanted to go live by tomorrow, which is not going to happen. However on the first of April we will try once again. It doesn’t help that our conversations with C are not really conversations but arguments. On the one side we have Walt who is an old dog. He works in telcom. This means that if VOIP takes off and we use it on campus. His job basically goes away. Now I know that sucks for him and all, but we are moving forward here. Anyway, he sees a problem with C’s implementation and points out the fact that we will not be able to test the entire system before we go live. There is a piece of the network that is currently connected to the voicemail gateway and it’s working right now. C’s point is that it’s working right now, so there’s no need to test it with the new equipment attached till the cut over date on the first. (which again is April first… you know april fools day). Anyway…

The last meeting I was in was a 30 minute conversation the looped 4 times. None of which I had any input into and therefore was a waste of 2 hours of my life that I will never get back.

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Another meeting I just got out of since I started writing this blog is that Cisco just got done with their intrusion detection scan of our network. Only to find that not much has changed and that our network is still the wild wild west. It was nice to see key areas that are vulerable... you know payroll and parking and transportation... etc.