Good Policy?

OK, you have an ex-SysAdmin who has been fired, told he’s a useless cunt (in exactly those terms) and who you’ve now re-hired as a consultant to take you through the period where you don’t actually have a SysAdmin.

In the meantime, you want to take the site that SysAdmin wrote, and give it a new look – effectively, redesign it, but without changing any of the underlying functionality. It’s purely cosmetic, a “changing of the guard” type thing. The redesign is seen, company-wide, as being pointless, and a waste of time/effort, as the next big job is – um – rewriting the underlying structure of the entire site, as it’s currently a nightmare. However, this will take about three months. So first you want to do the redesign, before going and doing the serious work. Bear in mind, the redesign will take at least a month.

While this SysAdmin is back on contract, you plan to tell him to impelement the redesign of a site – the site he wrote single-handedly, over five years – and bear in mind, this site redesign is the main reason that the conflict arose in the first place. SysAdmin doesn’t agree with the redesign (and has been exceedingly vocal about it), thinks it’s being done for the wrong reasons (it is and that the necessary time to do it could be better spent elsewhere. (it could) And you’re going to insist that SysAdmin tests it all, and makes sure it doesn’t conflict with any of the parallel sites that all run off the same basic underlying code and templates.

Hmmm, why do I suspect that this site redesign is going to be an utter nightmare?