It’s not extraordinary for large businesses to work with small businesses, but each has trouble adapting to the other’s way of operating.

See how this worker found a way to make it work.

Red tape: Software cutover edition

Back when the cloud was the new hotness, we were instructed to host our software at Amazon Web Services (AWS). This is a big company. Several layers of management, project management, and architects descended upon us.

Somehow my team was graced with being the first one to go, probably because we are unimportant.

The corporate processes waere all new to this team.

Spin up new infrastructure in AWS. Briefly dual-host in the old datacenter as well as AWS while we learn the ropes and make sure we can deploy our web service.

We declare that we’re ready to go whenever.

We’re not used to layers of managers, project managers and architects. My team was small (I think it was like 4 developers total?), largely ignored and inside a rogue division that operated like a startup.

It was the first time we’d been exposed to the red tape from corporate.

As soon as we set a cutover date, some PM sent me a ton of questions and paperwork to fill out.

They were not impressed.

Document the deployment process (uh … hit “Deploy” on our build server?).

Document the rollback process (we didn’t have one – when there was a problem we’d make a change and deploy it).

Who is the correct business contact who normally approves deployments? Uh, nobody. We just deploy.

Who is the correct technical contact who normally approves deploys? Same answer.

What architect do we work with? None. Which system do we use to log change tickets when we deploy? We don’t.

PM was not satisfied with my answers. Actually, that’s an understatement. She was positively irate.

A redo seems absurd, but he gives it a shot.

Every box on that form needed a proper answer.

Ok, fine. I’m the technical contact. I approve deployments. Reached out to my manager to use her as a business contact. The PM was not satisfied. “You can’t approve your own deployment!”

Ok, fine. I put down a coworker’s name as the person who will be running the deployment. That makes it acceptable for me to provide technical approval, right? Picked another coworker as architect.

I’m running low on coworkers at this point and the PM is annoyed that the “architect” doesn’t have a job title that includes the word “architect,” but at this point she’s starting to sound resigned.

Entered a user story in our work tracking software to perform the cutover. The PM doesn’t have access to our work tracking software, so she doesn’t know that it’s not a change request.

Finally, the end is on the horizon.

After spending many hours attempting to document our nonexistent processes, we finally got the go-ahead. The PM and a couple middle managers joined a call. “{boss}, do we have your approval as business owner?” Yeah sure.

“{me}, do we have your approval as technical owner?” Yeah sure. “{coworker}, go ahead and start the deployment.”

We waited 90 awkward seconds while the deployment happened. Long seconds, with way too many people on the call. It worked.

The cutover felt exactly as anticlimactic as the end of my story. Nothing interesting happened. We were done, time for the next team to move their stuff over.

But I definitely spent more time filling out paperwork and arguing about processes with the PM and management than I actually spent on this “huge” migration.

Here is what folks are saying.

It must be frustrating.

This sounds stressful.

I hope they ask for it!

Something to document after all!

Corporations working with small businesses need to understand how they differ and vice versa.

Thought that was satisfying? Check out what this employee did when their manager refused to pay for their time while they were traveling for business.