do you ship?

I know a lot of developers.  One thing that makes me a little jealous is hearing them talk about how they 'ship' their products.  In my career as an IT Pro, I've finished lots of big projects, but never got to attend a ship party afterwards.  I've worked on some pretty significant deployments, that probably had teams and timelines that were similar in size to some product development teams, but at the end of the project, I remember just nodding our heads, shrugging our shoulders and moving on to the next one.  My developer friends, meanwhile, were throwing big parties every time they released an update to their code.

Do you, as an IT Pro, celebrate the end of your projects?  Should we?

This post is actually quite timely as my team and I are in the final weeks of a pretty big project that deals with the deployment of a remote access solution for shared access to a demo router by students both on and off campus. This will give them hands on experience with both Telnet and configuring Cisco equipment in an isolated environment that will prove invaluable to them once they graduate. I don't think we'll be having a Launch Party seeing as it's a college campus, but I've always held the belief that when any big project ships within an organization that the entire IT department should be invited as we're the ones responsible tor putting the work of the Development team into production. If the IT department isn't included by default, your particular organization should at least extend an invitation as a courtesy.

Just my thoughts...

+Josh (Wa)

Oh oh! I know!

Maybe some of our nice developer friends could invite us to dem "Ship" parties...

Of course in my case, I would need to work for Microsoft first to get invited by a Microsoft developer but the sentiment is still the same.

I mean we of course would most definitely return the favor.

No?

How about splitting some nice cold Canadian beer eh?