Technology can bring out the best and the worst in people. Recently my team released a few upgrades that laid the ground work for a future overhaul. Though the change was minor we couldn't make it without affected some users. Despite the impact, the change was deemed more important than the temporary discomfort of a few folks and the was given the "green light" for release.

Changes rarely go 100% as expected and this change was no different. In the end a few key features were unavailable for longer than we'd anticipated though ultimately information was not lost, only delayed. This was still unacceptable to a few who vocally made their displeasure known. Of these "complaints" only two were truly related to the problem with the rest falsely correlated with the upgrade. In other words most of the problems weren't a result of our change but that didn't stop people from blaming it anyway.

Users are funny like that and we in the IT development and support field find it comical at first, but it can quickly become a nightmare if you don't set the record straight immediately. In our case a quick email blurb informed everyone that the problem was isolated and would only delay things, not destroy them. For most this was enough, unfortunately for a few others it did little to reassure them nor to reinforce my belief that users actually read system status bulletins. In my opinion if it isn't a 5"x7" flashing yellow warning sign that pops up when you first log in someone will miss the "memo".