using WordPress and A Project Manager’s Perspective…
Business-critical Cisco Unified Communications Manager modernization for provincial automobile association, replacing end-of-life CallManager infrastructure and migrating the enterprise telephony platform while maintaining integrations with voicemail, SIP, contact-centre systems, voice gateways and remote locations.
Pre-migration assessment uncovered significant latent faults in the legacy production environment, including database corruption, synchronization issues and an underlying network condition resulting in business-impacting telephony outages.
This was a difficult project that taught me the value of structured incident response. This was a particularly sensitive environment because the client’s roadside-assistance operation depended on its telephony systems being available around the clock.
The upgrade had a planned outage of approximately one hour. Unfortunately, the underlying database corruption and synchronization problems resurfaced during the upgrade, and the interruption extended to approximately eight hours. At that point, my responsibility shifted from normal project coordination to managing a significant service-impacting incident.
The technical engineers were responsible for diagnosing and recovering the system. My role was to keep the recovery effort organized, ensure the right technical expertise was engaged, maintain a clear incident record and provide regular, transparent communication to the client and internal leadership. I established a cadence of engineering coordination calls and stakeholder updates, escalated to senior technical resources and Cisco TAC, and ensured the client had current information even when the recovery timeline remained uncertain.
One of the challenges was that a straightforward rollback was no longer feasible, so we had to focus on the available recovery options rather than assuming we could simply return to the previous state. The system was ultimately recovered, but the outage was substantially longer than planned and the commercial and relationship consequences were significant.
The client’s confidence was understandably affected and I certainly don’t present this as a successful project. It is, however, a good example of how I respond when a project goes badly wrong. I coordinated the technical and business workstreams, including user acceptance testing, issue resolution and preparation for the transition.