Friday, December 30, 2011

App Development Update

I recently asked to be assigned a new project manager.

I was becoming increasingly frustrated with the project manager. I found her emails to me to be patronizing and contentless. On the two occasions we met, she was late, first 10 minutes then 20 minutes. During the second meeting it seemed that I had waited 20 minutes so that she could get up to speed on where the project stood.  Mid-December I called her to find out if the company would be open during the last two weeks of the month so that I would know if my project would be on hold until everyone returned. She said that people would take a day or two off but that my project would not be delayed. She said that I will be pleased with the progress. Not having heard from her, I called again on Dec.21 to find out about the status of the project. The receptionist said that my project manager would be out for the week. I had been considering requesting a new project manager and decided that the time had come. I called Earl and told him about my frustrations.

This afternoon I met with Earl, the head of animations and my new project manager. It turns out that the animation team had a number of questions about the script as well as changes they wished to propose. Some of the actions in the script were too difficult or not doable. The designers also felt that the script was boring because it was repetitive. I appreciated the feedback. I explained my reasons for the writing the script the way I had. We talked about their ideas. Earl proposed that another meeting take place once the animators had a chance to show me their ideas. I should hear back from the team within 2 weeks.


4 comments:

  1. Sorry that you're having such a rough time with you development team. I went the other route and assembled my own team locally. We were all relative newbies to the whole app development system but it's been fun to learn together.

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  2. Thank you. I'm looking forward to a more positive update soon.
    Have you completed the app or are you still in the development stage?

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  3. My app Is SpeechStickers and is a practice app for non-verbal & minimally verbal kids (mostly with childhood apraxia of speech). Our first version has consonants /m,p,b/ and 5 basic vowels but we are about to put out an update with /t,d,k,g,s,sh,n/. I'm always thinking of great app ideas but since we are all "evening & weekend developers" (with real day jobs), nothing happens as fast as I want it to.

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