Get's too crowded at the top..

Sometimes it is better to be small, it is better not to grow especially when growth is not handled well!!
My company in all it's infinite wisdom outsourced all networking, desktop (well, now it's laptop ;) facilities and operations to another BIG company and it has been a nightmare eversince. Well, I had my worst dream recently :|.
I don't think that our company that is primarily into making, distributing software products did well when it made that decision..but well, decisions always look different after they are made :).

Anyways, we had a connectivity problem with a client recently and all hell broke loose..The first thing that was blamed was our application and then the client's and of course applications are always right ;). Well, in this case they were. We smelt rotten eggs in the network and called our BIG provider and all he asked for was whether we made any changes and when we vehemently denied that, he made us recycle our applications and verified that once more and then started the cycle ....

He called the company's situation manager.
That manager than called somebody from the firewall team who started blaming the client's network for this problem and obviously the client did not like this. The client blamed our company's network and soon it was a war of words with no resolution. We had to take control over the situation that was going out of our hands and get very specific logging enabled on the client's and our network and then had the problem resolved very soon! The whole experience made me think whether we complicate things more by trying to make things simpler? The company to whom we outsourced our processes is a very big company and ofcourse it has a lot of processes in place to handle situations adeptly, but well it didn't do us any good! I worked for a startup earlier and these issues never took this long to resolve!

We had NOC, Firewall, Coverage, DCNE, Situation Management teams on our side and the networking, operations on the client's side to resolve a simple networking issue and all this because the "problem had to handled by the right department" :). From my perspective, getting the problem resolved consuming as few resources as possible would have been the best solution! Isn't that why we streamline our processes? But, here this case is a classic example of overdoing it!!!!