If you've been following along, then you know about my increasing concerns about our chosen service provider. Oh, I'll eventually name the company. But, for now, I want to give them the benefit of the doubt.
I'm still holding out some hope (not fool's hope, I, uh, hope ) that, by the end of this project, our service provider and I will look back to today with nostalgia as we celebrate a wildly successful project completion. I hope we'll be able to correctly label these first two months as the fluky pains of the project initiation stage.
If the project's a success, I won't have any problems naming the service provider as they'll be associated with me as their happy client. Even after this rocky start, I'll be happy to serve as a client reference (with all the disclosures and caveats, of course), as I'm wont to do with any deserving service provider who ultimately delivers.
Now, if it isn't successful--and especially if it isn't successful because of the kinds of issues I'm wading through right now --then you bet your a$$ I won't have any problems naming the company anyway.
You'll know about it, and so will all my contacts and forums I frequent on every social network I'm a member of. I'll let you decide if that labels me a vindictive client. I don't see it that way.
From my angle, I'll be helping steer my friends through the rocky terrain I had to tread through. Hopefully they--you--will take everything I share in the Longhorn diaries and do one better than I. No matter which way this turns out.
All that said, I can tell you that, at the moment, I don't have that warm fuzzy you get when everything's going as planned.
"Pop!.... fizzle..."
After a strong start where the company's client account manager conducted an inspiring JAD session with my team, I have to say everything else since has been tinged with the bitter aftertaste of disappointment. (I'm getting poetic in my age.)
A deliverable--the requirements specification document --was to be delivered within days of our first meeting. It didn't happen. To the credit of the client manager assigned to us, he called to let me know he was gonna miss the date due to some personal issues. So I agreed to reschedule.
After another miss and some iterations, we ultimately renegotiated for it to be bundled with the user interface designs (UI wireframes, a sort of stick-type mockup of representative pages). The package was s'posedly "on track" for delivery by a date that was about two weeks after our JAD session. And, a date that also coincided with my planned holiday vacation.
No problem. If my team could have a full set to review and mark-up during my absence, I offered that I would then simply review all feedback on the day I got back from holiday (Jan. 6). We'd then schedule a meeting with the service provider's team the following day to present our combined feedback. Of course, that was all dependent on my team receiving the wireframes during my absence.
Delivery of the wireframes was met...sort of. But, not really.
Delaying tactics.
When I got back from holiday, I found out the account manager assigned to us apparently hoped we wouldn't recognize a delaying tactic when it stared us in the face.
The (woefully skosh) deliverables my team received during my absence was presented as a "first set" intended simply for the purpose of getting our feedback on "...layout, form, typography and overall look and feel." That's all well and good. After all, that's the purpose of wireframes. But, in this case, we were missing representations of many other key sections. Sections that were to have a different layout than any of the designs I had been given to date. These missing sections were necessary to get an overall sense of the flow for our system.
I recognized it for what it was; a delaying tactic. To be frank, it pissed me off. When pressed, I later confirmed my suspicions. The resource to whom the task had been assigned, had quit.
By this time last week, I was set to can our service provider . I had actually begun reverting to "Plan B."
Stay tuned.
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