📦 The Sales System Project – Overview Link to heading
This series dives into a complex, long-running engagement centered on a fragile in-house sales system.
The customer hosted 1,000+ Windows systems across development, test, and production stages.
What began as firefighting evolved into automation, observability, and ultimately organizational change.
The Journey begins Link to heading
About 14 years ago, I took over responsibility for a single, large, in-house-developed sales system. It was under constant pressure from all sides — management wanted faster delivery, developers were overwhelmed, and operations was left to deal with the fallout.
The system itself? Slow, unstable, and full of bugs that no one could reliably trace. The system failed us over and over, for no obvious reasons. Everyone was doing their best, but no one had time to step back and think.
So we went into task force mode.
Over the next two years, we laid the groundwork that would eventually scale to managing over 1,000+ Windows systems across development, test, and production environments.
Topics in This Series Link to heading
A high-level overview of the customer’s infrastructure setup and the initial issues the sales system faced.
Back in the early days, this is what we did to get some visibility and basic control.
What we did was good — at the time. But platforms need to evolve constantly to stay ahead.
Technical progress is one thing. Organizational change brings deeper and longer-lasting impact.
Automation is the key to getting more things done in less time.
But sometimes you interface with external teams or systems that do not share your level of automation — and that’s where friction begins.
Stay tuned — each topic will get its own deep-dive post.
Get in touch
Email me: starttalking@sh-soft.de