For me now, this is an important tool in my arsenal of favorites. Creating an inventory was a basic step in the management of the project. It reminded me of creating a catalog of library resources with its own unique fields and categories. The categories selected relevant to Babson's holdings were communications, computing hardware, computing software, facilities, nontraditional computing devices, and office equipment. No matter what planning takes place, things will go wrong on January 1, but the goal of this project has been to minimize the surprises, to make sure the mission critical systems do work, and to create a process to deal with any surprises that happen.
Computer glitches are already a part of our knowledge base.
Even with a systematic, thorough approach, some items are missed, and some are inadequately identified. Some people who should bring products forward for review did not understand their role. The inventory brought to our attention lots of obsolete programs, many of which were left on the machine as users went to new products. Since these were not part of the current load, they are not on the new computers. A directive to the community in the instructions with the new machines urges checking the compliance database for any products needed locally that were not part of the initial load and only reloading those that are compliant.