Maybe Give Us The Access

[Jay 2K Winger]

It used to be that [Our Office] only handled re-orgs within [Our Org], but starting a couple of years ago-- following a certain case-- Our Office has become the one-stop shop for re-orgs from any org. Now if we get a re-org from an outside org, we will submit a request for a particular [Access] to the outside org's share drive so we can go in and do the work. Once the work is finished and the ticket closed out, we submit another request to remove the Access.

We have done this several times over the last two years, and no outside org has had any issues with this. Until my coworker [Mezza] picked up her current project.

This project is a standard data migration job, but it's with [Other Org]. Accordingly, she submitted a request for Access to their shares so she can prepare to do the work. Only, Other Org's IT support ([Those Guys]) denied Mezza's request, apparently because they saw Our Org on her account and demanded to know why she was requesting Access. She patiently explained the situation, and Those Guys started insisting she didn't need Access, that they would submit a different request to give her a lesser access to the shares, which they said would still allow her to do the data migration. Mezza tried explaining that she still needed to have Access in order to create the necessary folders and groups in Other Org's share for the migration, but Those Guys said they could do that for her.

There were Skype meetings and phone calls and emails going back and forth about this for the past couple of days, as Mezza has told me. We both of the opinion that if Those Guys wanted to do all the back-end work instead of giving her Access, then there wasn't really any point in having Our Office involved at all, but whatever. She put up with Those Guys up to today, when they gave her the lesser access.

Or at least, they claimed they did. Mezza can't see Other Org's shares. Those Guys said she should be able to, but she has read out on the phone and sent screenshots of the errors she gets and the lack of folders she can see with this alleged lesser access. Those Guys are insisting on trying to troubleshoot this, telling her to try rebooting her workstation-- and she has fired back that she has tried logging in on multiple workstations to prove that it isn't a matter of her profile not updating, this lesser access does not work.

Mezza and I both seem to believe Those Guys are locked in on doing things "their way" to avoid giving her Access, and she'll only get it when either:

A -- They exhaust all of their procedures and finally just give her the Access as she initially requested, or:

B -- Mezza talks to our boss, who talks to Those Guys' boss, who tells them to stop it and give her the Access.

It's annoying Mezza as she can't continue on the project until this gets resolved.

[Ironclad Alibi]

Informing the bosses should have been the first step in this situation.

[csquared]

"Request for access has been denied by [Those Guy]. Assigning project to [Those Guys]."

[RealUnimportant]

Either of the above. Whether they're doing this because it's their patch and they don't feel safe, or don't wanna, or (because we all know it's an option) it's because she's a she, they're being dicks and they need to have someone remind them of their place in this world.

[Jay 2K Winger]

Having dealt with other IT teams like Those Guys before, it has nothing to do with her being a she, and it's most likely down to "this is our patch, you can't have Access because you're not in Other Org."

That said, Mezza's spoken to our boss, and our boss knows someone over in Those Guys' patch, and may be able to push things along in a fashion that will get things working.

I found out also that granting users general access over in Other Org works differently, still grandfathered in from the "old ways" instead of how things are done now. (No, I don't know why they haven't updated the method to suit the current standard, but it turns out Other Org is one of the more central orgs at The Client, and so get to dictate their own rules in a lot of ways. But I digress.) In these "old ways," users were just added directly to folders, instead of being added to access groups like we do now. When Those Guys gave Mezza the lesser access, they added her directly to one specific folder, but this means she can't navigate through the drive to get to that folder. She was trying to navigate down to it, whereas Those Guys expected her to just copy-paste the folder address directly to get to it, and never communicated that to her, hence why she still "didn't have access" to it.

Regardless, Mezza, our boss, and Coworker L are all still working to get this straightened out so the work can get done. But Our Office's general mindset when other orgs' IT start effing about like Those Guys are is "we don't have to do this work for you, you came to us, so let us know when you want to stop messing around."

[Jay 2K Winger]

A new wrinkle in this tale.

So there's a new re-org that came down the pipe, a fairly big one, as one of Other Org's central offices is getting a rebrand, so there's a lot that needs to get renamed. Mezza and I are taking lead on it for Our Office. Our boss assured us she would sit in on the initial meeting (happened earlier today) and stave off any objections to us getting Access as needed for the re-org. Meeting went well, got no static from Other Org's people on it. We submitted the necessary requests to get Access, and the only hiccup was I needed to complete a security refresher for my request to go through.

And Mezza now has Access, huzzah.

Now, there's some other issues with this whole re-org, already within the first few hours, but that's it's own thing, maybe there'll be enough to be a post in its own right later.

[Jay 2K Winger]

I guess I'll wrap this up here. Both Mezza and I have Access now, all is right with the world.

As I mentioned in the last post, the new re-org that Mezza and I are working on is a fairly large rebrand, and the "other issues" I mentioned came down to a misunderstanding on our part. With their re-org request, Other Org had sent along a spreadsheet with what we assumed were share drive folders that would need to be re-named. But after receiving our Access, we couldn't see the folders we assumed they were talking about. We found some folders that looked like they might be the ones in question, but they weren't in the folder we were going to be renaming in the rebranding.

So we had another meeting with Other Org about this, where it was clarified for us that no, we're only renaming the one folder, the spreadsheet has org strings that will be renamed, not share paths. We had the correct info.

The main thing that just makes us laugh about this re-org is that they want it done by August 4, which is pretty much impossible. And fortunately, Other Org seems aware of this, and have shifted their expectations to a more reasonable "get as much of the groundwork done as possible by Aug 4, so we can get it done ASAP after that."

[Jay 2K Winger]

Might as well conclude this little side-story about the Other Org rebrand, if only because of the twist--

There is no twist.

Everything went off without a hitch. Our POCs with Other Org were all on board with the plan-- a plan they actually suggested, which would satisfy their needs without a huge amount of data migration. We kept them repeatedly informed of their responsibilities for making sure their userbase wasn't logged into any of the data during the rebrand, and advising of any potential hiccups they might see. We scheduled the rebrand to happen in the evening after everyone had either gone home or finished their work and logged out of the data, groups and folders got renamed without errors.

The only slight hiccup that people got was their email auto-filling addresses that no longer worked, and that was something we told them, "if this happens, have them do [xyz] and it'll work." There was the barest amount of pushback on that-- this wasn't something we could 'click-click-done' on the back-end, it had to be done by the users themselves if they encountered the error. I sent along a set of instructions explaining how to do [xyz], and it's been astonishingly smooth.

Mezza, our boss, and I are all more than slightly surprised it went this well. We were bracing ourselves for the other shoe to drop, but as of now, all the groups have been renamed, people have been accessing their data without issue, and we look to have pulled it off.