A Launch and Fighting with the Hydra of Mistakes
Yesterday I felt a great relief: At noon we had the launch of the new intranet of my office. We had been working for the launch for over one year – and the whole process took more than two years. (I had mentioned the project in a number of posts.)
About 2 months ago we saw that part of the project had to be taken out into another project: The document management, which shall replace the file explorer, turned out to be more complex than we had thought during the concept phase, so it will be developed in a second tranche of the project – again me as the project manager. We will start when I’m back from January’s holidays in India. It seems that this will again be a long project, we will start with a pilot.
Being the project manager I had a lot of trouble with instructing the team, finding and describing mistakes and cleaning the system. The last weeks we had been working on the migration of the content from the old intranet into the new system, and the team of our info-managers had done a good job, but – mostly out of ignorance – also created several “crises” by trying to adapt things in a “try and error”-way. I sometimes was reminded of Hercules fighting with the Hydra: Having cut off one head, two other heads appeared. The mistakes of the system didn’t seem to take an end.
Hercules fighting with the Hydra. Image of Antonio Pollaiuolo, from Wikimedia Commons
And then the launch – the director giving congratulations, the head of the agency speaking about the pioneer work and me about the team-work and the surprises of the process – happy faces all around.
An hour after the launch new problems popped up – no safeguarding possible with different pages, strange way of presentation of the news in one of the news aggregators. This morning some other questions popped up…. The last months my patience has been tested a lot – and quite some times I failed. It seems that my personal testing phase isn’t over yet.
An old sewing machine – not so complex than a modern web collaboration technology, but also helping to stitch different matters together.
