Rob and Alex arrived on site Tuesday morning, joining Andrew and Nathan from Monday. Four people, one WiFi cabin, and the full build week ahead.
More significantly, Tuesday was the day the HTG support desk went live from site. From this point on, the Hartlepool office is empty. Every inbound support call, every ticket, every monitoring alert — handled from the festival estate for the rest of the week.
The Desk Goes Live
The switchover was straightforward. The VoIP desk was registered, the monitoring stack was connected, the ticketing system was open. No client noticed anything had changed — which is the point.
That photograph is worth looking at for a moment. A Yealink desk phone, a live support queue, and through the window — a festival tent. The two things that shouldn't really go together, working fine side by side.
Why We Do This
High Tide Group doesn't test its business continuity plan on paper. We test it by doing this — moving the whole operation somewhere it has no business being and running it as normal for a week.
The festival environment is a reasonable stress test. Temporary infrastructure, power from generators rather than a building, connectivity that we've built ourselves rather than plugged into a landlord's fibre point. If the operation runs normally here, under these conditions, then the BCP is worth the paper it's written on.
This is the third year we've done it this way. The desk went live Tuesday morning without any issues, and it'll stay live until we pack up Monday.
Follow the build diary all week on the High Tide Group blog, LinkedIn, and Facebook.