Several kick off meetings

The first thing we did was to meet with the Fatwire team. It was a revelation.

Fatwire is the software that will drive our new websites.

Having worked with Firefly for a while I have become used to it's restrictions. Naturally most of the questions we were firing at the Fatwire team related to limitations we experience with the current system. I don't think there was anything we wanted to be able to do that didn't seem possible in the new system. If there's anything you would have asked the Fatwire team, leave a comment and we'll ask for you.

The next thing we did was have a kick off meeting to introduce the key content and application stakeholders to one another. Included in this meeting was a 'quick and dirty' user experience thought starter. This caused great debate and we had to stop ourselves from designing the answer, before we knew what the question was. The biggest applications impacted by this meeting were Configurator and Features and Specs and there were follow up meetings arranged to dig into the detail of these applications.

Then we needed an IT kick off meeting. This was an attempt to nail down more of the detail of what will be done, by whom. It's always tricky to do this before the scope of the project has been identified and before completion of the initiation phase things are still a little hazy. One of the key outcomes of this meeting was the need to mesh the IT and Wunderman work plans because as they were presented in the kick off meeting, there was a huge disconnect.

Somewhere in the midst of all of these meetings we had funding sign off - sighs of relief all round.