Yet Another Immersion Day Post

Posted by Chris McKinnel - 29 March 2021
5 minute read

I don't know if anyone is reading this blog (I could check, I have Google Analytics set up) but it seems like I talk about Immersion Days a lot. This post is yet another write up on an Immersion Day that I have recently ran, although this one was slightly different as I had multiple customers in the room instead of only one.

It was my first Control Tower Immersion Day for a customer, which had its own unique set of challenges (covered below).

It was an interesting dynamic as customers often aren't at the same place in the cloud adoption journey. I can see multiple-customer Immersion Days being potentially challenging in the future if the attendees from different customers are at completely different parts of the adoption journey. How do you cater for one customer that's just beginning the journey and a customer that's been using AWS for years at the same time?

One of the good things about getting multiple customers in the room together is they can talk about what mistakes they made or things they would do differently if they could go through the process again - potentially short-cutting pain and hopefully reinforcing the strategies we've proposed for their adoption journey.

I didn't take any photos so had to use a generic banner!

Challenges

Every attendee needs a master payer account
There is a heap of backend process to get new AWS accounts created, switched to invoicing, on-boarded to SPP, etc, so the easiest way to get a fresh master payer account is to create one with a credit card.

When I ran a 40 person Control Tower Immersion Day, I asked each attendee to create their own AWS account with their own credit card, as it would have taken me too long to create them all (and clean them up) myself.

It didn't feel right to ask my customers to create their own AWS accounts with their own credit card, though, so I created each attendee their own account.

The morning after the Immersion Day, I had to log into 31 accounts as the root user (first having to reset the root password for each), and then close each one in reverse order of them being created. It only took me about an hour but it was a very tedious hour!

Each new account needed Control Tower deployed ahead of time
Because Control Tower takes up to 60 minutes to deploy (if it works), I couldn't really get attendees to do this on the day. So I had to create the accounts, wait at least an hour, and then deploy Control Tower into each.

I'm not sure what we can do about this - I think the Control Tower Immersion days are just the hardest ones to run because of all the preparation required.

Learnings / Improvements to make

Do the damn Labs!
I just ran out of time to go through the labs myself for this one. I decided to do the public Control Tower labs instead of the ones I wrote for our internal-only Immersion Day, assuming that they would be good enough that we could just troubleshoot and fix any issues attendees had on the day.

Unfortunately some of the labs were really broken, and almost all of them had linux-only commands built in. So we had to translate from bash-type commands to Powershell and CMD for our Windows users (like 90% of attendees).

I got a CSAT result of less than 4 for the lab content - which was a good kick in the bum to make sure I do the labs and fix them for future Immersion Days.

Update the slide content
I'm getting pretty good at blagging my way through outdated slide decks, but it's unprofessional having old content and I really need to dedicate some time before the Immersion Days to go through and update the content.

I've reached out to the Immersion Day team and have been told they are looking at focusing on updating the content and delivering the whole lot from a single place, which should fix this problem over time.

Control Immersion Days are hard!
There is a heap of admin that you need to do to run a Control Tower Immersion Day, mainly around account creation and clean-up. Any more than 10 attendees would become tough to manage for a single person.

The advice from AWS is to get your customers to bring their own AWS accounts to the day, but that doesn't sit right with me.

Take a photo or you'll need to use memes in your blog post
It makes for a pretty boring LinkedIn / blog post if you don't have a photo of the attendees hard at work. Especially during Covid where we're one of the few places around the world that can actually run these days in person.

The whole day is a long day
This is the second Immersion Day where the session length in my CSAT scores were a little low. I've got one coming up that's an hour or two shorter than the ones I've been running, so I'll see what the CSAT scores come back as for this.

Failing that, a half-day instead of a whole day might be the way to go.

Summary
Another successful Immersion Day, lots of learning was done and in the end it should result in both customers adopting some AWS services that they probably wouldn't have.