I would say, it has at least been up more consistently. There are issues that have never been fixed and we've learned to live with them. Things seem to come back around, I question how they manage their source code. You think they've ever rolled anything back? I don't see any evidence of that. They break something and we live with it until they get it fixed. Sometimes we limp along for a long time. The current issue with searches is a great example.
Unfortunately I think their change management processes are either broken or not even being used. When I first started my previous job, a planned release would go something like this:
1. Tell some people changes are happening. Most of the time a vague message that doesn’t make it to all the stakeholders that need to know.
2. Shut down the services to the application on the servers.
3. Get a call or two from the IT operations center telling us that we have services down on our servers. They were not include in the vague email.
4. Start running scripts, file copies, blah blah blah.
5. Five things break during deployment. Spend two hours trying to find the cause.
6. Find out the cause was either:
A. There was a change on a downstream process that we were never told about, and when we applied our change, it broke.
B. Missing or incomplete steps in the migration plan
C. Someone forgot to label their code, or provided an old copy of a file to be migrated
D. Wasn’t even tested in the stage environment before deploying. Turns out it didn’t work there either when we did deploy to stage.
E. It was labeled to be migrated, but wasn’t actually ready to be migrated.
F. There was never any testing done and no one bothered to check to make sure it worked in stage, before moving it to prod.
7. Apply “fixes” two hours later or try to roll back, assuming they had an actual roll back plan to begin with.
If this sounds like it total cluster, you would be correct. If you think that was a small or mid size company, you would be incorrect. It was a multi billion dollar company who has interests all over the world. It is a Fortune 100 company with over 33k employees that grossed $36 billion last year. Wyndham (a Fortune 500) only grossed $4.6 billion. So my old employer who grossed 9 times what Wyndham pulled in, some how managed to limp along with the “Wild West” style change management. So it doesn’t surprise me that a smaller company, with fewer resources would struggle.
They need to hire some change management experts and get better processes in there. I wasn’t a change management expert, but with the help of the change management team, I was able to get some change processes in place that reduced the risks of failure greatly and we had a lot less down time. We saved money and our sanity when things were not breaking at 3 in morning. I wasn’t going to go to the owner meeting in Austin, but recently I’ve started changing my mind. I might bring this up if I go.