Ricky & Stick - Know the Deployment Environment
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It's all too easy to focus only on the benefits you'll get from a new system: its hoped-for functionality, the ROI it will bring, or whatever other great things were the selling points that got the program approved in the first place.
And this can mean that you ignore thinking about context, and about whether the deployment environment is capable of supporting the new system (in much the same way as whether a flimsy tree house can support the weight of a very heavy stump). If it can't, then you may find yourself expending a huge effort getting the system into place, as did our heroes, only to come to grief.
Nor is this necessarily a hardware issue; the moral is no less applicable (in fact is very applicable!) to a large, complex software system. Lots of questions are apt: What additional software resources are needed for system deployment? Who has the responsibility to supply them? How much will deployment cost? Where are those dollars in the budget? Will it deploy in stages? and so forth.
The moral is that you and your contractor need to know explicit details about the deployment environment -- load factors for instance -- and then be sure that the system will operate properly in that environment. And you need to know it way upfront: though the deployment process may be far in the future, deployment planning should be done at the earliest part of the project.
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