Plan all you want...

Since a portion of what we are supposed to learn in this class is to be able to guide our web projects to completion via successful project management, I thought I would take a few moments to share my story with you all. It might be interesting, or not, but it will certainly allow me to vent a little.

I've been guiding a really cool project for a year now. By design, we were going to use blog software to create an article based community forum (not forum software, but a forum) for faculty at my institution to share and comment on teaching and other professional experiences. A lot like what we have going on with this blog, only times about 1000.

We worked on the project for months. We spent many hours working with multiple departments to design the specifications of the page. We selected the software, created many customizations. We held a focus group to get initial feedback. All in all, we did everything by the book to have a successful project.

Unfortunately, we had excluded one group of decision makers that saw our finished product, loved it, but had reservations that the information was available to the public. These changes were at the very core of our design, and required us to redo 80 percent of our work.

The moral of this part of the story is that buy in is important, but so is getting all the buy in needed. Had we done a better job of incorporating a few people that we thought were neutral to the project, we would have been done ages ago.

Moving on, I sat down with my team and a revised list of specifications. We set an aggressive deadline to roll out our new service on Feb. 27. This gave us 3 months to reinvent the wheel. In a way it was a good thing. As we redid things, we took the opportunity to get things right the second time. Opportunities presented themselves that weren't there the first time. We did a good job of briefly exploring these new options without changing the scope of the project... we'd put it on a phase 2 list.

I started work last Monday with a handful of last minute tasks, a week to complete them, and a deadline of Tuesday at 3:00 for an unveiling at an event that would be hard to reschedule. The next day, 5 days ago, a sever virus hit our campus that spread like wildfire. All the PCs (go Mac!) on campus had to be touched. Each touch takes about 2 hours. Higher priority projects than mine had to take the back burner. I've worked 75 hours since Tuesday with more to do this week.

The lesson I've learned from this experience is one of priority. It seems that no amount of planning can ever address all the bumps in the road, but having a good sense of priority, and being able to order things on the fly because of that sense, will save lots of time. I was not in a position to make the tough calls with the priorities of hundreds, but I've been able to observe some great leaders who were. As a result, we've navigated much of this hurdle in a reasonable time without other services crumbling.

So that's my story. I was gonna build some cool stuff in JavaScript and write about that on Saturday, but I'll have to get to that next weekend. It is funny, sometimes I don't look forward to my ETL work sessions that I set aside each weekend, I have to go to the library to work as motivation. But after this weekend, I can't wait to relax with my laptop and actually use my brain!