As some of you may have noticed I have not posted for the last week. Part of the reason is personal, I am facing my final class for my degree and it is taking more time then normal partially due to workload and partially due to paperwork involved in getting my ducks in a row for graduation.
The other reason for my not writing is the purpose of this post. For those who know or have worked with me I am a person who when I make a commitment I will do anything I possibly can to make sure I honor that commitment. In rare occasions this has led to sleepless nights, lost weekends and even working on a plane while traveling for a vacation. The point is I will do whatever I can do to make sure that commitment; be it a deadline, milestone, or product release is met on time and as promised.
For the past year I have been working with a vendor whom has been promising delivery of a near mythical enhancement to their product. All the while they have been releasing targeted product literature and basically drumming up good press about their upcoming product release. Our members in turn have been asking when this is coming and why we don’t have it yet my answer has been the same no firm release date has been set and as soon as we have one we will let you know.
Last month our vendor came did a presentation and stated that their release would occur the first week of October. We asked them are you sure this is solid? Basically reminding them of the last time that they promised a release and it failed to occur on time, they reaffirmed that the release date was indeed solid. When pressed they said they had had the release in beta for several months and were sure they had all the issues worked out and they were even working on a post release enhancement for the upgrade.
Thus began the drive to inform the membership. Having only two weeks lead time I began a blitzkrieg notification effort, flyers, resource pages, mass mailings, targeted mailings, developing courses, office visits, broker visits basically we made sure every member of our association knew this release was coming what it would mean for them and got them as excited as they could be about the release.
Coming into work one week prior to launch I receive an email which states in-a-nutshell; we are sorry we found a bug in the release and are moving your release date back two weeks to fix the issue. Thus my week has been spent telling everyone that the release date has been pushed back.
M y question is how does a vendor miss a bug like this? Don’t get me wrong I know bugs are part of the game and I know that you always want a quality solution but how does a vendor miss a bug that basically makes the entire system unusable?They have testing resources, heck they have clients already using this particular release, how do they still miss a bug like that?
I know this is not much of a post after a week of silence, hopefully the next week will offer some juicy bits as I will be down at the upcoming CAR meetings. If you are down there as well and happen to run into me please don’t hesitate to say hi.
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