Olympics Part Deux

Last entry, I stopped at the point when we finished the Athens Olympics with a wonderful technical performance on the web site. Sales were very good for the first try at a global event site but page views weren't since no one thought about marketing the site. No one upstairs said thank you to the basement dwellers like me and I was depressed for several weeks because even though the hours were ridiculous during the Olympics, there was a real adrenaline rush to keeping that site working round the clock. I was also depressed that I had gained four pounds eating large portions of Egg Bake every morning at 6 a.m.

The Torino (Turin) Olympics were only eighteen months away when we finished Athens. A well managed company with good planning and staffing policies would have created a calendar for those eighteen months with milestones for beginning work, hiring people, etc. A company with a sense of organization would have made sure that everything that was done during the games was carefully documented so it all could be easily repeated.

Nah. We launched into some other projects that absolutely had to be done that very minute and forgot about the Olympics for a while. I'm sure no one could name one of those projects now. We would pull it out, we were pros now!

The results coding did start well ahead of Torino because the company supplying us data said that's when they were going to start. We took a trip to FL (very nice but short), set up a good process for working together, and started. The results work went well through the winter and spring.

But what about everything else. Well six or seven months were spent on design, a lot of it on creating lots of little widgets that rotated, changed content, and did other coool stuff. We went to meetings about the site all that winter and said "we'd love to start coding that stuff but we have to relaunch the Kane network first...don't worry, we'll be starting Olympics soon." Ha ha.

Six months later we were still launching the Kane network--we had done nothing on the Torino site because "key resources" had to make tricky changes to the Kane sites that we were told to do by people upstairs who "changed their mind" or "just didn't think things through" the first time. Before we knew it, it was Fall, we were still relaunching the Kane network and the OLY site was not started yet. Uh oh.

At this point I was asked "Why do you work here?" by my you-know-who and I knew I had to leave, not because I was scared of the work ahead, but because the stress and paranoia of working with that management team was making me ill. The situation was tough but I thought the team would pull it out with the help of the excellent people on the Tech side that had pulled it out last time.

Unfortunately, at this point The Network Who Shall Not Be Named obviously decided that it might be fun to make a little company in Minnesota squirm or maybe writhe would be a better word. Okay, it probably wasn't a malicious conspiracy by The Network, but it was a perfect storm of several new half-thought-out projects. The Network said all these projects must launch in December--the same time as the Olympics site!

This is where it gets really bad. Next part tomorrow.