Policy Change Effecting all IaaS Customers

Date: 4/11/2019

To: All Fischer IaaS Customers

As we continue to evolve our operations and make the necessary changes to ensure smoother maintenance for your instance, we are instituting a new policy. In the past, upgrades have had their fair share of issues. Largely around UI customization. While I understand the importance of ensuring your user experience is exactly what you need it to be, I have observed times where changes are being requested to interfaces less than 24 hours prior to the actual upgrade. While this process has been in place for a while, it is my observation that allowing UI changes to occur so close to an upgrade puts my staff in a position to rush to get new changes in place (because we don’t want to miss dates).

The rush of last minute requests / changes limits our ability for code review and peer review and is one of the symptoms of UI related issues you’ve experienced post upgrade. As a result of what we have observed in the past, I’ve instituted a policy where we will not make any UI changes once we hit two weeks prior to your scheduled maintenance window. The effect on you is to ensure that you find time to review your user interface(s) in TEST to ensure it is acceptable to you and if not, you should immediately provide user feedback so we can react and make the changes before the two week freeze arrives. This will help all of us to collaborate closer together and make sure that your production maintenance includes the necessary tweaks or changes you’ve requested.

We will still work to ensure your requests are fulfilled in a timely manner, but I hope you understand that our goal is to provide a quality product and a smooth upgrade process, with minimal to zero post-upgrade issues. In order to make this a reality, our Infrastructure team needs time to ensure all components of the upgrade have enough time to be tested and and we have time to complete our internal code review process.

So what can you expect moving forward?

We will inform you of your maintenance window and include the last day that we can accept UI change requests out of your TEST environment. I am confident this will help out our mutual customer (the end user) to have a smoother transition between versions of our product. Once the maintenance is complete, and the UI is available, we will begin working on any change requests you may have. I’m hopeful you see this change as a betterment of our process as we continue to focus our efforts on a more predictable and effective maintenance process, resulting in a higher quality product.