For many of our customers, our service was free because our billing system was a mess. Even a re-org couldn't fix it. A few years ago, my team was running a large distributed mail system serving the employees and customers of a national telco. The system ran very well, but from a management perspective, it was a real headache. The employee accounts were all over the map; half of them had no name attached or had For many of our customers, our service was free because our billing system was a mess. Even a re-org couldn’t fix it.A few years ago, my team was running a large distributed mail system serving the employees and customers of a national telco. The system ran very well, but from a management perspective, it was a real headache. The employee accounts were all over the map; half of them had no name attached or had a name that made no sense. We didn’t know who our customers were, and that was a problem because we couldn’t bill them if we didn’t know who they were.The billing information been imported from other systems and had been lost in the migration process to a new system. Because of all this movement, we estimated as much of 75 percent of our traffic was for accounts either not being used or not being paid for. Management finally decided we should start over. On my team, Alex and I were responsible for the redesign. He was going to put together the actual server software and message store. Rob from the Web design team was to create a flashy user interface to manage accounts. My job was to set up the database and write an API so Rob’s web interface could talk to our systems. We went through the usual drill of having weekly meetings, and appointing a project manager to make sure we were on schedule and to manage our tasks. For months we met every week, constantly reviewing the schedule, usually relatively satisfied that things were moving along nicely. One day about two weeks before launch, Rob and I were on the phone and, just out of curiosity, I asked him how much of a pain it had been to get access to the billing systems. Our corporate firewall group was notorious for making life difficult for developers needing access to core systems. The pregnant pause that followed was not a good sign. Imagine my horror when he asked, “You aren’t doing the billing?” Let’s review: We were doing a complete redesign because we had a lot of users who weren’t being billed for service. We had a project manager keeping track of all the necessary tasks. And he never bothered to make sure someone was talking to the billing people so we could bill the customers. A few weeks later, the company reviewed the situation and took action. There was a major re-org and the project was conveniently scrapped. The old mostly unbillable service is still in production today. Guess the re-org served as a nice, temporary distraction, though. Data Management