We have been testing the Ambitionblog website for almost three months.
Our developers are working every night till after twelve. We are communicating with them via “Gmail” and “Skype”.
Why is the website not finished yet…?
Maybe we have so many cool ideas to implement that we keep on changing the specs?
Maybe it is the physical distance between us and them?
Maybe our decision to give young developers a chance to build the site of this scale… (part time)?
Maybe the developers are so enthusiastic that they add to many “nice to have” gadgets?
We have decided not to launch until the site is the best possible platform to promote you.
A bit of a tug of war, though…?
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Maybe our decision to give young developers a chance to build the site of this scale… (part time)?
ReplyDeleteUsing young developers is not necessarily a bad thing, they have fresh ideas and are most up to date with web trends as far as the front end is concerned. There are lots of wonderful stories about students developing revolutionary applications part time (Google, Napster, Facebook ), there is the benefit of saving cost, but you need to get the product to market. Keep it simple, keep it robust, make it work. It's an ongoing, living system - not a once-off delivered product.
Maybe the developers are so enthusiastic that they add to many “nice to have” gadgets?
In my experience with delivering systems, the priority is to deliver a simple, working system with the core functionality implemented, but most importantly, on time. Focus on keeping it simple - simple to develop, simple to maintain, but more importantly simple to use.
Let me tell you about my experience. Maybe it will help someone else who is busy with a similar project.
ReplyDeleteI was appointed Project Manager at the beginning of 2008 being responsible for adding one of our products to the web.
I have decided to make use of our current service provider regarding the programming.
June last year we completed the product and we then decided to make it available to some of our clients to test before going to the broader public.
At the same time we decided to host this website using the same service provided that is currently hosting our company's main website.
The client feedback came back and although they were very impressed with the product, they had one criticism - the response time is too slow.
Upon investigating this it was clear that this had nothing to do with the line or the company responsible for the programming.
The problem occurred because the company who is hosting the website seriously underspec our requirements and provided us with hardware that can simply not handle the traffic.
Lucky for me, I mentioned this to a person at our Christmas party who is very experience as far as IT goes. He since has done a proposal providing the correct hardware/solution for this product.
The problem is that we need to get out of our initial contract that we signed for two years and sign a new contract with this service provider.
The launch of this product is on 24 March 2009 and this gave us very little time to rectify this situation.
I found it very frustrating because you trust that your service provider will give you the best advice/solution possible. I do not have the knowledge or experience to negotiate regarding harware requirements and basically placed myself in the hands of someone else.
I am told that you can go on to Google and ask for minimum requirements regarding the programs you use. If I only knew this earlier!
I have learned so much during the last month or two and wish that I had this knowledge at the start of the project.
I assume we make mistakes to learn from them and luky we picked up the problem before going alive!
It looks like it is all systems go for the launch.