project management bitch

"I ain't no PM bitch"

This is what I said to my co-worker the other day. It came out during a moment of frustration and deep down inside, I knew that it was a false statement.

For the last two weeks I have been acting as project manager for the merchant area of our website. The folks who run this part of the business seem to have no ability nor the inclination to successfully figure out how to get their site produced. So I've been trying to take an 85 page powerpoint presentation on "must-have functionality" and writing technical requirements. Not my cup of tea.

The hardest part of this task is getting these guys to make up their minds. Every other day they change their minds about how something should work. Whenever a new idea pops into their heads, they turn to me to scope it out and figure out how to build it. I honestly do not understand why anyone would want this job full time.

The bright side is that when this is all over I can look to both the consumer site and the merchant site and say "I built that."

fast track it!

The last day or so has been a crazy series of "we need to get this done as soon as possible" projects. Pace at a startup is supposed to be frenetic for sure but this is ridiculous.

First, our business development team decides that they want to hand out flyers at a conference they are attending. I'm all for it if it will help them close important deals. Problem was, I had only two days to write a creative brief, take the agency through it, get and revise concepts from them, present to the biz dev guys, get approval and product and print them!

Today, we decided to redesign an important page on the site. I walked my CEO through the propsed change on the phone (he's in NY), mocked it up in Powerpoint and sent it to our developer. After talking through uses cases and design issues for an hour, he started to code. Crazy! But I'm not complaining because having zero product development processes ultimately is what will allow us to get this new design live by next week.

One day this stuff will be impossible because we'll have to sift through stacks of "requirement forms" and argue our way through "prioritization processes".

Ctrl + Alt + Del

I had a funny conversation with our new Director of Application Development today. We were talking about how to handle weekly code pushes and escalation procedures for when there were problems with the site. She mentioned to me that she was taking my name off the emergency alert notification list.

What was I gonna do when our managed hosting provider called me anyways?

HOST: Your site is down. What do you want us to do?
TOM: Have you tried pressing Ctrl + Alt + Del?

But this is in fact the first thing they do! Okay, they don't press the keys in that sequence but apparently 90% of application and webserver problems are resolved by just rebooting! Ha! Who would have known?