Yusuf Bramwell — Principal, migration and cutover. Has run one hundred and forty change windows and lost two of them, which he will tell you about before you ask.
Three rehearsals, and the useful one is always the second. The first finds the obvious faults. The third is theater. The second is where people learn what they are allowed to decide.
You cannot ask a utility to have a quiet year. So the rebuild ran through the season it was needed most, and the old wall map stayed lit until the day it did not.
The board on the corridor wall was not a backup. It was the actual system, and the software was the thing people worked around. Getting off it meant earning the board back.
Nobody would sign off a single weekend, and they were right not to. So we did it nine times, in windows small enough that a rollback was never the interesting decision.
