4 years, 1 Allergic Reaction and a Product Release.

That's right that's my face after launching an internal enterprise product that took 3 years to develop. Not technically the most difficulty product we've developed, but the most political and emotionally draining, with the added bonus of almost dying during its development (i had to use dragon speech for a day which i  looked like this: allergic reaction to nuts).

In this same 3 year time zone I've created an entire new systems and platforms around the world that supports 26 sites consumer A+E sites, developed 4 mobile apps, 12 games, and at least 70 other sites.

In Addition, i had the added pleasure of talking to 300+ people in 50 countries and every time zone in the world for a month, to explain to me why they hated my redesign (we won 90% of the over in the long-term its  just a better product, also extreme attentiveness and positive energy in the face of criticism throws people off - though i didn't sleep for like 2 weeks after it launched to field every single customer complaint, issue and feature question)

How did these 3+ year time frame happen?

Let's go through my steps.

• Gather requirements for site corp clients (6 months)
• Define and plan scope + project plan.
• Develop Wireframes (2 months)
• Technical assessment of wireframe - first error, have to develop current back-end system to meet front end needs (different departments)
• do initial workflow and system infrastructure  needs based on user groups (6 months)
• Work on core Database infrastructure (1 years)
• Review RDB taxonomy and Architecture (3 months)
• Business team and goals have changed re collect product requirements (6 months)
• Present wireframes/Designs to new team executives  (1 month)
• Current Executive teams wants a more complete picture of all IT needs.
• Analysis team looks at all regional teams comes up with a system integration plan (9 months)
• Present wireframes, designs and functionality to exec team
• Start building! (1.2 years)
• Show Prototypes to new exec team (third one in 4 years) - redesign site to meet their needs. (2 months)
• Launch!
• now restart.

In this time my team grew by 40%, our business and scale of content doubled in 3 years and we made a ton of patches to keep the current app stable . And Of course every bullet on the way was a budget fight. What frustrating in the experience was:

• To many managers not enough developers. The developers or the product managers, we where not allowed to prototype or develop unless all documentation and analysis was complete. It never was, since the business scale and requirements kept changing.
• everything was workflow and analyzed to death,  in a department that was growing at 25% a year. So all workflows were old once documented
• Nobody has any faith in their corp IT departments, this is a self-fulfilling prophecy of failure. No one wants to work with them, just blame them. (i became an ambassador to the groups as the "product manager"
• There is no difference between a web site and corp system. Everyone, including IT, wanted to believe they where separate. My web team, was originally not part of the development work going on in the system teams, so we never looked at each others work, nor trusted each other's code. The clients never cared about CRON jobs, or RDB schema's, or Access Forms (yes i know)  not matter how important they where, they play with the Website, they want some type of data to appear in the website. These teams should not be separate.