Last week I was working on an upgrade and ran into a few issues. Whilst waiting for the company’s support team to come back to me I had a few attempts on my own to resolve the problem but had no luck.

When the support team came back it didn’t take them long to uncover the problem, me.

I’d tried to be a bit clever at the start of the upgrade and made a change to the system that I thought would be of no impact. As soon as that change was reversed, surprise! The issue was resolved.

After eating quite a lot of humble pie I got to thinking about my problem solving process. To be honest, I’d forgotten about the initial change that I’d made and spent too long focusing on other areas. What I should have done is gone back to the start of the process, detailed each step I’d taken and what impact those steps could have had.

Now, I was going to give the advice of “Always follow the instructions” but, I’m a tinkerer by nature and not likely to change.

So with that in mind, here’s the advice I’m going to give to any fellow tinkerers out there: –

• Read the instructions
• Note any changes that you want to make
• Test those changes on a development system
• Does the system still work?
• Roll back those changes
• Does the system still work?

Hopefully following that advice will prevent you (and me) from repeating the mistake that I made last week.

By noting down any changes that you’ve made, when you encounter issues you will know where to start. Sounds simple huh? Yeah, I know…

Still not going to stop tinkering though

Have a good week!