Why is it assumed they knew more - I currently have a project that was supposed to release the end of August. We are caught up in contracts. I have little control over my own legal department - less control over the vendors.
We have another project we’ve told people we were going to do - but now don’t have budget to do it - so now, after several months of telling people its coming, now will be doing something significantly smaller. It has, however, taken months to agree to this new scaled down project.
I have one in “technical difficulty” mode - we’ll release it once we figure out what the issue is - unfortunately, its been a month of the technical person saying “next week for sure!” It isn’t that they aren’t working on it, its that they can’t figure out what the issue is.
If Ed doesn’t have absolute control over his resources (Jerry’s time and his budget) then there is plenty of reason to believe they told us what they told us when they could and there was the least probability of having resources pulled.
I’d say the difference here is that the PM is probably having regular project status meetings with the stakeholders involved. In other words, communicating is being done, ultimately, to the people to whom promises (implied or otherwise) were made. I didn’t see a lot of that being done in this instance. Sure, you have a few naysayers and complainers on the board, but many people would have been thrilled to get even the smallest blip of an update, just to let everyone know that it’s still on the radar, etc.
Currently I’ve got a GPS on order from Dell. I placed the order a week ago, and it is slated for shipment on 9/18 because they ran out. While I can’t call Dell every day to find out of they have new ones, you can bet that on the 19th, I’ll be checking to see if my order has shipped, and on the 20th I’ll be e-mailing Dell to ask them to update the status of the order in some way or another if nothing has happened. I’m fairly certain Dell will preclude this by either shipping the GPS in a timely fashion, or by updating the status of my order once the ship date has passed, and the fact that they have done so in the past inspires confidence in my doing further business with Dell.
The “customers” here aren’t irrational because they expect the same sort of thing from their online message board home.
That’s it exactly. Though Jerry and I work closely together, I’m not his boss, and he’s working on a long list of projects with extremely limited resources. Emergencies and distractions arise constantly. It’s impossible to predict when projects will completed; what we’re trying to do is considerably more complicated than getting a package delivered. I told people what I knew pretty much as soon as I knew it. More frequent updates would have consisted largely of my saying, “Jerry’s working on it when he can. I don’t know how soon he’ll be done.” I doubt that would have made anyone much happier.
Anyway, I think everyone has said what needs to be said. Thread closed.