How We Jumped Into Expedition One Totally Blind
Remember that Friday team meeting when our boss slammed his coffee cup down? “We’re trying Expedition One starting Monday,” he announced. Nobody asked questions. We just nodded like bobbleheads.
First step was messy. Monday morning we all crammed into the tiny conference room with sticky notes everywhere. I grabbed the marker and wrote three goals:
- Make the damn software run without crashing every hour
- Get actual users to test it without complaining
- Stop working weekends for this project
The Disaster Phase Where Everything Blew Up
Tuesday was chaos. We rolled out Expedition One’s tracking system and immediately broke production. User complaints flooded in like Niagara Falls. My phone kept buzzing with alerts while Mark from QA yelled “I told you so!” across the office.
Wednesday we hit rock bottom. Our dashboard showed 83% failure rate. Mike from accounting stormed in demanding to know why we blew the budget. I chugged my third energy drink and gathered the team under the flickering hallway light.
The Sketchy Workaround That Actually Worked
Thursday morning we got desperate. Sarah scribbled on a napkin: “What if we ignore the rulebook?” We hacked together a Frankenstein solution – mixed Expedition One’s method with our old spreadsheet system. Felt like duct taping a sinking boat.
We ran tests all Thursday night. Ordered terrible pizza that gave Dave heartburn. But at 2AM, the failure rate dropped to 39%. We high-fived so hard Janice from cleaning yelled at us.
When We Finally Saw Real Numbers That Didn’t Suck
Come Friday afternoon, magic happened. User complaints dropped by 70%. Our dashboard glowed green for the first time ever. The boss walked in holding termination papers – then saw the screen and literally did a happy dance. We all awkwardly joined in.
Final stats by closing time:
- System stability up from 17% to 91%
- User satisfaction scores doubled
- Weekend work eliminated completely
What We Really Learned Through All This Mess
Expedition One’s textbook approach? Total crap for our team. But the core idea of forcing us to measure everything? That saved our project. Turns out when you stare at failure numbers daily, you stop making excuses.
Biggest shock? The boss took us for beers and admitted he’d never used Expedition One before. We all got drunk and laughed till we cried. Now sales team keeps bothering us to do “Expedition Two”. Might actually say yes.