Every now and then a project comes along where the requirements either are never clear or they are never clear and they keep on changing.

Add this to the situation where you haven’t just moved jobs, but you’ve transferred from global headquarters to the smaller sister company who’s just acquired a team of traders from another company who sits under the same umbrella and literally in the same building. Still with me? Thought not.

It was here I had one of the most ridiculous exchanges with a department lead that I will hopefully ever have. It went something like this:

Me: “In order for us to update firewalls and Identity Access Management configurations, we are going to need a definitive list of all of the sites, servers, applications etc that your team is currently using.”

Department lead: “Why can’t you tell me what we are all accessing?”

Not off to a promising start… but patience is a virtue that has to be built from the ground up. When you have stakeholders or sponsors that don’t take a project you’re working on all too seriously, you often need to understand and accept that they’ve got much bigger things on their plate and think of other levers to pull to get and keep things moving.

So, appreciating where the department lead was coming from, the next step was finding out who could be allocated X amount per week to assist me and the project team in compiling and working through this list.

While the access part was fun, it was closely followed by software and server migrations not to mention an all too tedious ISP setup where, believe it or not, a parked car was enough to delay access into a DMARC point for a couple of weeks. Remember what I said about patience?