Today, "Do Not Reply" at the Inland Revenue Department (IRD) got in touch (again) to let me know that they were updating the look of their website for filing GST returns:

What’s changing?

Here’s a summary of the myIR changes:

* The ‘My GST’ section will change to ‘My business’.

* The design, layout and tab labels will change to make it
  clearer and easier for you to find your way around and use our
  online services, as well as give you assurance of where you are
  in the process. You’ll notice we’ve:

  * Created more whitespace

  * Increased the text size

  * Changed the tabs on the first page of the new ‘My business’
    section.  They will change to: Accounts, Submitted (where
    you can see any saved drafts, submitted or processed returns),
    Correspondence (messages or letters previously under ‘Activity
    centre’), Registration details and Logons

  * Changed ‘Quick links’ to be 'I want to...' 

* Continue to file, pay and amend your GST.

and advises "Information about these new changes is also available on our website." (archived version) for which the description of the changes is also online (archived version) and it does include a few non-GST related changes.

The email goes on to advise that there will be four and a half days of downtime for the IRD website to make these changes:

Some of our services will be unavailable while we make these changes

In order to make these important changes some of our key services
will be unavailable between the afternoon of Thursday 12 April
and the morning of Tuesday 17 April. During this time you will
not be able to access myIR Secure Online Services or contact
us through our contact centres. Any secure mail messages saved
as drafts and any draft returns within myIR will be deleted as
part of this process. Please therefore check your secure mail
messages and submit any draft returns before Thursday 12 April.

Those date are confirmed on the IRD website (archived version), and repeated on a second IRD web page (archived version) whose URL hints that they are treating this as a fork lift upgrade.

As someone who works in the IT infrastructure industry, and watches the technical blogs of major online technical sites, that appears to be an outage window at least four days longer than is common in modern IT practice, particularly for an upgrade that is described to end users as changing the names/ordering of some tabs on a website, and updating the layout. (Many high tech online sites do regular A/B testing of site layout changes all the time, in production, without any interruption.) Even major banking web sites, which do periodically announce outages, seem to manage to do their work with only 12-24 hour maintenance windows.

It is also conventional to schedule an extrememly long maintenance window on a public holiday long weekend, such as Easter occurring in a couple of weeks, rather than on a random weekend where a four and a half day outage inevitably ends up crossing at least two business days (thus resulting in the need for a lot of business process to manage being effectively "closed for business" on a regular business day).

To add to the fun, this apparently major upgrade -- four and a half days, presumably ending in a mainframe being wheeled out the door -- is being done immediately after the end of the financial year for most New Zealanders and New Zealand businesses. If it is, as it appears, a bigger upgrade than "changed the names of some tabs" and "updated the layout", then one would hope that IRD is very very certain that the new version works perfectly; major upgrades are usually scheduled for a quieter time of year where possible, for good reasons!

I guess I will not be filing my GST return in the middle of April....

ETA, 2019-03-26 And this year IRD announced they would be closed from 2019-04-18 15:00 through 2019-04-26 08:00 to update their systems. Apparently last years long shutdown was not sufficient to do everything.

"During this time you will not be able to access myIR or contact us through our contact centres. Our offices will also be closed." And it will apparently also involve deleting all unsaved drafts of messages and returns, because reasons. Since I'm travelling early April and my GST return (up to 2019-03-31) is due in April, I guess there's now a narrow 10 day window in which I have to get it completed. Joy.

For the record, yes, some of that "closed up shop" period is over Easter, but IRD are also closed at least an additional 3 days beyond the Easter Statutory holidays including their website. And those public holidays are often when the self employed get a chance to "catch up on the paperwork".