3.8 Review Potential Integration Issues

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This load-balancing tale is a superior example of project-driven technology that did not integrate well into the target environment, and is presented to stress the value in making Fit a primary target of your technology vetting process. Thoroughness is the only trick here. We once had a situation where the engineers wanted to roll out the most current version of the LAN authentication process. This software is part of the LAN operating system, and manages a database that tracks user identifications (IDs) and network resources such as shared printers and servers. The engineers wanted to use the new version because, although radically different, it was the next step for the global network, and they wanted to use our project as a test bed within the production environment. At first that seemed all right, until I got tipped off that the new system was incompatible with the company's Domain Name System (DNS). ^[2] This meant that if the upgraded authentication software does not interoperate with the DNS system, users could not log into and utilize network resource without manual intervention. Needless to say, this was a less than comforting prospect.

When confronted with this concern, the engineers came up with a workaround that sounded strange to me, although technically I was way out of my league. Still, as project manager, I was unhappy with how all this made me feel, so I asked the engineers to meet with our security and operations people. These folks did understand the issues and they quashed the initiative on the spot for a whole peck of reasons. We went with the older, DNS-compatible system. Within 6 months, the two systems became compatible through vendor revisions, but that half-year wait was out of the question as far as our project schedule was concerned.

^[2]DNS resolves IP addresses.

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