Deadlines

I'm in the middle of composing a post covering the last couple of months, but thought I'd publish an interim note just to say that our go-live date was Sept 26th, which was Monday. Didn't happen (obviously), and I'll post more on why not, and the fairly spectacular fallout later.

I'm willing to bet that there hasn't been a project like this since Boo.com.

Suffice to say that if anyone hears of any good tech jobs...

Background 2

Oh. And everyone on the project hates everyone else.

Background

The project is 18 months old. Nothing has been produced to date. There is a set of documents that define the core elements of the project:

1. Cutting-edge Flash application:
- 250+ pages of editorial content
- segregated premium and anonymous browser content types
3. Content Management Solution to provide the content for the Flash application
2. Full eCommerce platform, to include:
- Bundles, offers and promotions
- 'Superdistribution' - otherwise known as referrals
- Vouchers
- Multilanguage, multicurrency
4. Customer Relationship Management platform, to include:
- Customer list segregation
- Campaign management
- Incoming email management
5. Digital Asset Management system:
- Delivery of licences for DRM protected content
- Delivery of download and streaming media
- Asset management

All of the above to be integrated to provide a "unified" user experience for customers and administrators alike.

Platforms for all the above have been selected, each from different vendors.

We have 6 weeks to build and integrate the platform.

First post

Welcome to the first post in my series on software project disasters. I'm in the middle of one, and felt like a bit of sharing, hence the blog - let's call it the "I told you so" column.