Nothing ventured, nothing gained

This project is on the tightest schedule imaginable and we are constantly looking for ways to remove time because, as we all know, time is money.

Time is also a big fat delay between you using Firefly and having a brand new shiny ENGInE tool.

One of the things we thought we could do, which is outside the normal process, is deliver bits and pieces from a large package delivery, and deliver them early.

The original plan was to deliver one large User Experience (UXP) package on June 30th. This would contain things like navigation, templates and associated template philosophy, content philosophy and accessibility.

Our revised 'clever' plan took elements from this large package and tried to deliver them one at a time ahead of the June 30th deadline.

This gave IT early sight of things which meant they could start work early.

This has sort of worked. Things have been accelerated and IT have had early sight of material they wouldn't have seen until the end of the month. But it's not been a perfect process.

Maybe we should have forseen problems but I am an eternal optimist and when somebody shows me the possibility of doing something quicker or smarter or with better quality, I jump on it and want to make it happen.

What we didn't realise was that if you tie down one template before you've worked on some of the associated templates, you hit issues that mean changes are necessary to the template that's already been agreed and packed up in its box.

So we thought we had the first template defined, but it's now undefined, or at least in flux. The changes might be minor but any change, even a minor one, can be significant when it means a change to specification.

I don't think we're worse off for trying to do things more quickly. I think we're better off than we could have been. But it means things aren't quite going to plan.

Being the eternal optimist I can see the benefits of going through a bit of pain now. We're learning about how to work together and I think that will make us a more effective team moving forward.