I don't often directly talk about events at work, but for once I'm going to celebrate something rather cool that's happened. We've moved offices!
Despite the valiant efforts of our estates people, the Macmillan offices in Vauxhall were ... well, terrible. Vauxhall itself is a roundabout with delusions of grandeur and the building was slowly falling about around us. I do not frequent the office too often, so I was rather surprised during a trustee meeting when the whole building started to shake like the apocalypse had come. Nobody else blinked - this was "normal" to the point of it happening several times a day. The rest of the day gave a glorious demonstration and I have no idea how anyone copes, frankly.
So for this and various other reasons it was time to Be Elsewhere. However for us in Tech this meant we had to face the (kinda literal) elephant in the closet - the server room on the premises. This was not a comms cupboard, but a proper server room, with ageing steam-powered servers bolted the floor, powering the organisation. But this was not a time for panic and fear - instead, we had a fantastic opportunity to take a big step modernising our systems. A golden opportunity to spend a chunk of time significantly moving the dial on our legacy tech debt in the service of a hard deadline which the org needed hitting. We grasped this opportunity, with months of work spent virtualising, reconfiguring, and rebuilding to bring things into a much better state in preparation for the move.
To actually move, we initially had to plan for disabling everything. However, with every week of work where we cleaned up dependencies and updated our overall configuration we decoupled systems and by the time we came to do the move, the only services that we actually disabled were the ones hosted on the machines we had to turn off. This in itself was a huge win, but the move weekend itself was exceptional. I've been involved in lots of tech projects over the years, and many releases, and something always goes wrong and needs correcting at the last minute. We had our share of challenges, but for the week before the move we were having daily meetings in which we were looking at each other wondering what we had missed - things were calm. Then the weekend was so well executed it was almost unsettling. The team didn't exactly stick to published timings, but only because they were so far ahead.
Overall, it was incredibly smooth and not only did this enable our office move, we have finished with our systems in a much better place, either in the cloud or in a proper data centre and better understood, and run by a team with a great deal of (very much earned) confidence. An exceptional result on the back of a lot of hard work - really knocked it out the park.
The second, and far more visible, part is the new office itself. This was clearly much wider than the Technology group, but we had a crucial role in making sure the new premises had an internet connection (which it didn't until quite literally the 11th hour ... worrying times!) and working AV, door controls, room bookings, etc etc. The wider team did an excellent job bringing everything together on time and it is lovely being in a modern office which doesn't shake when the trains go by. In particular (for my post!) I'm going to say the technology is working rather well. The new meeting equipment is very easy to use, with great sound quality and scary cameras which track motion to zoom in on speakers. I wonder if I can mount a nerf gun on one of them...
So yes. Some excellent work here and well worth recording. A great result for Macmillan. For the Technology group, not only did we play our part we've also managed to modernise, increase knowledge, improve resilience and other great things across our server infrastructure we ALSO managed to remove a load of problems with the office AV. As I said at the top, I don't often write about specifics here but I thought I'd make an exception.
And to close, here are some pictures of the new place including the most important part of the new office building - a button which gives hot chocolate milk...
Congratulations everyone!
