Originally Posted by
monksy
This is an indication that they don't know what they're doing, and they haven't for a while.
These kinds of upgrades should happen seamlessly. However... business people.
Sorry, but it’s absolutely ridiculous to level such a charge unless you’re intimately familiar with the project.
If the system was designed to be updated without downtime, that’s one thing. But if it wasn’t, it can be extremely difficult (read: prohibitively expensive) to update it in place. If the work being done is what’s been suggested — consolidating several databases into one — most project plans would call for a maintenance window, because otherwise you’d run a real risk of getting transactions out of order, displaying stale data, etc. And the older the system being replaced is, the worse of an idea it is to try to take shortcuts.
United IT is far from perfect, but they deserve a pass here, at least as far as requiring a maintenance window goes.