EUGENE, Ore. - Call Kirk Letourneau at SELCO Community CU here and you'll take for granted the smooth phone connection. But behind the scenes, in the wee small hours of June 2, Letourneau traveled the rocky territory that is all too familiar to an IT executive as he fought to preserve that uptime.
"Everyone can point to their own example of a project-gone-nasty, usually around core conversions," said Letourneau, IT director at the $825-million credit union.
Letourneau's story, then, is the story of a telecommunications upgrade-gone-nasty, played out by an unsuspecting but earnest vendor from out-of-town, the SELCO IT staff of four working in tandem, some "weird" technicalities and a happy ending, according to Letourneau.
It's a story that many IT departments can relate to because planning and testing and implementing-and testing-just isn't enough sometimes during a technology upgrade.
SELCO was attempting to replace its 7-year-old Voice-over Internet Protocol telecom servers with new generic hardware; upgrade the telecom software; and virtualize two additional servers instead of replacing the hardware, said Letourneau. The cutover would save money for SELCO and allow for some nice, new user and administrator features.
"It's frustrating to flip the switch and have it fail, even though we had a parallel system going and started testing two weeks ahead of time," he continued. "And we were using a vendor to do the heavy-lifting. We did so much right."
Sometimes an IT manager just has to go home at 1 o'clock in the morning after a long weekend of working to cut over, only to go back to the credit union at 2:30 a.m., when the staff calls and says to abort the project.
"The weirdness was just so technical in nature that it's not worth talking about," Letourneau explained. Suffice it to say that the new phone system was out of whack and no one could figure out why.
"There was a strong desire to just push forward, especially when you're really tired," he added. "But we thought, 'if we just charge ahead, what sort of demons will we be chasing when business starts up Monday morning?' So we decided to cut our losses and try again another weekend."
'Tail Between Its Legs'
The vendor agreed, said Letourneau. "Even though the vendor had to fly their entire team back again, and it cost them a lot of money for this to go bad, they pushed it back."
So the conversion team "put its tail between its legs" and reverted back to the original hardware for the telecom servers, he said. They didn't give up for good, however. "We took the time to figure out exactly what went wrong and why and ensure better results for the next time."
About three weeks later, on June 27, the team fixed the glitches, and the system was up and running on the new hardware and upgraded software, he said.
The new primary and backup telecom servers and 300 handsets run on contact center software that handles all phone calls, online chats, e-mails and voice-mails.
Associated components include an SQL database server, a virtualized call-recording server, a media server that helps the primary server handle calls, and a chat server that runs the website chat system.
One of the immediate benefits is that the software can now route all voice traffic that was once handled by physical voice cards, he said. "That's really nice because we don't have to deal with port issues on specialized hardware or keep up with voice card contracts."
Letourneau had tried a different support vendor in the past-with even more disastrous results, he said. "That was for the 2007 software upgrade, and we ended up with the system down for four hours during the first live day."
Despite his thorough plans, Letourneau said he wishes that he had been even more involved in the telecom conversion the first time around.
"I'd like to be more insistent about getting my way," Letourneau said. "I'd like to object more. I'd like to trust the experts but verify them. There were some key decisions made without me, even before the cutover. And on that weekend, there were still some sidebar conversations going on. A vendor can hide things from you."
MORE
Read more about system conversions at cujournal.com and search the following bolded terms:
Reports Of Computer Glitch At Acquired CU Overstated Problem, PSCU Says
Charlotte Metro CU's Conversion to Multi-Factor System Exposes Some Accounts
One CU Tells How To Survive Core Conversion
How Technology Can Smooth The Sometimes Bumpy Road To Merger
For info on this story:
www.selco.org
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