…and there are days when you meet someone you feel you were destined to meet, sooner or later [0]
Which got me remembering one of the projects I ‘ran’ while I was in Oxford. This project was a collaboration between four companies. This project taught me a lot about how to work with people.
I was working for one of the technology companies (there was one other tech company and a couple of big brands who were willing to put their name to the project as long as they didn’t have to actually commit any resource). My boss had spent a lot of effort bringing together the group and enthusing them about the possibilities of the project – rather too much enthusing and not enough actuality, in my view.
There was a deadline set for a demo in three months, with a beta trial in six and public launch in nine months, a challenging schedule but achievable. In order to meet this schedule we needed to get the technology rolling pretty damned quickly, so, having been given authority by my boss to run the technical side of the project I set up a mailing list for the developers to communicate, inviting anyone to pass it on to whoever I’d missed.
Oops, I missed the (non-technical) director from the other tech company. Mainly because I didn’t have his email address, or phone number, or indeed full name.
He was spitting blood when it came to the next meeting, ‘what the hell do you think youre doing?’ ‘we havent finished the negotiations yet’ ‘youre making me feel unimportant’.
Given that its six weeks until we’re supposed to have a trial running and we haven’t started coding yet I don’t feel I’ve done anything wrong by trying to encourage some communication. However, after his outburst (firstly on email copied to the whole project, then in one of the main project meetings) I suddenly lost interest in the project – I felt it was going to fail if anyone was adopting that attitude and the sooner I got myself out of it the better.
Sadly, since my boss had spent a year setting up the deal in the first place he wasn’t prepared to just drop it, so we carried on making appearances at the meetings, while we were off developing some interesting back end engine technology to go behind the sexy UI we were trying to sell, leaving the UI to rot badly – it was hack on hack, untested, breaking all the rules in the name of speed, just an excuse for laziness.
There came a point where somebody had had enough and decided to rewrite the whole thing in Java, whereupon it came out three times faster and much easier to maintain, and our input was no longer required.
And today, I found some potential for the technology behind the engine.
[0] No gossip here, this is strictly business.
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