Serious question, our project management system crashed right before a major client deliverable

It happened Tuesday morning, just as my team was finalizing the quarterly report for our biggest account. The whole platform went down, showing nothing but an error message. We had a hard deadline of 3 PM that day. I spent the first frantic hour on hold with support while my designers scrambled to pull local files from their computers. We had to manually piece together the presentation from old email threads and cached versions, which added another two hours of work. The client was understanding, but we still missed the deadline by 90 minutes. Has anyone else had their core software fail at the worst possible moment? What backup process do you have in place now?

2 comments

2 Comments

tyler8221d ago

That "scrambling to pull local files" part is the worst feeling. We had our design tool go down right before a website launch. Now we do a mandatory local file save to a shared drive at the end of every single day, no exceptions. It's a pain but it saves the panic.

briannguyen1d ago

How do you get everyone to actually stick with the daily save rule without someone skipping it? That kind of habit is tough to keep up, even when people know it's important.