Upgrade weekend: a project that didn’t work out so well

If you tried to access A Girl’s Guide to Project Management over the weekend, you probably came up with an error message.  Your feed might not have worked either.  That’s because I moved servers and upgraded WordPress, all at the same time. Fortunately, I set aside the whole weekend to do it, as technology change and me haven’t been happy bedfellows in the past.

I planned the site migration.  It wasn’t exactly a full-scale Microsoft Project plan, but I did have a piece of paper with a list of what to do on.  The idea was that I would back up the database, install it on the new server, keep the old server running for a month or two with a message on it saying where the blog had moved to, and then there would be a neat transition period, with everything going smoothly for you, the readers.

Except it didn’t happen like that.

For a start, the instructions on server back-ups were surprisingly easy to follow, even for me, even working with a French interface with a whole host of technical vocabulary I had no idea about on Friday.  This should have made me suspicious, but lulled into a false sense of security, I carried on.  I even read them start to finish before I did anything, like an exam paper.  I’ve learnt a lot more about SQL databases this weekend, all of which was useful, about half of which was interesting.  The back-up part went well, until the command to delete the old blog. Which I did.  Then do some other stuff, then re-install your old blog.

That was where it started to go pear-shaped.

I know that IT projects (and this was one, if on a very small scale) shouldn’t be implemented without a plan to roll them back if it all goes wrong.  And I know that you should be cautious, and that contingency is a very good thing.  So why I thought that it was a good idea to delete something with no idea about how to reinstall it, heaven only knows.

So like the good project manager I am, I switched into issue management, came up with some possible solutions and settled on the one that seemed the easiest and less likely to create more problems.  The downside is that it is not quite as transparent for you as I had hoped, but a good communication strategy should help that along.

What this means for you is:

• If you have subscribed to RSS updates using the button on the right, you will be OK.
• If you have bookmarked the URL http://www.pm4girls.co.uk, you will be OK.
• If you have the URL http://eharrin.free.fr/wordpress either bookmarked or linked to somewhere on your own site, then in mid-May that will stop working.  Please update your link to http://www.pm4girls.co.uk, which is the short-cut link to getting to this site.

Don’t worry, I’ll post a reminder when the time comes to shut off the redirection.  In the meantime, I have learnt a valuable lesson about technology implementations and the headaches they can cause if they don’t have a back-out plan.

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