A Warning Nobody Has to Sign For Is Just a Suggestion

At PowerFlex, sites kept going down. Not powered off, but invisible over the internet.

Every time, a truck rolled out with a technical employee to find out what was wrong. That's an expensive way to deploy new hardware and new features.

One of the things I found was that early site surveys had already told us where connectivity would be hard. Somewhere between the survey and the install, that input got ignored.

One example: equipment installed deep in the basement of a parking garage, where a cell signal was never going to reach it.

The survey had flagged it. Nobody had to act on it.

I owned the PM team, so we pushed to change the checklist. Once we knew a site had a connectivity problem, we had a more direct conversation with the site owner. If they wanted to build it anyway, they had to sign off and accept the risk.

It slowed installs down. It also caused friction, inside and outside the company. Sales wanted sites built and running. The service side wanted them visible and manageable, because that's ongoing service revenue. Both incentives were legitimate, and they pulled in opposite directions.

But it also meant real conversations happened about where to put connectivity for the equipment.

A warning nobody has to sign for is just a suggestion.

Where in your process is a known risk being ignored because ignoring it costs nothing?