New Years Preparation – Cleaning Up the Project that Would Never Finish

The end of the year is coming up quickly, and I’m hoping to clear up some old projects to make a clean break going into the new year.  Last spring, I picked up a customer and started a project with them.  The customer had a technical point of contact that I was supposed to work with.  That was atypical, normally I do this particular type of work directly in what ever system I’m working on. 

In this case, I had to do some work (web design, reboot a site, and a little SEO work).  The site was not simple html, which meant that I had to have database access to actually test it completely.  Now, long story short, I never got that access, never got access to a test server either.

So I had to do a lot of the design in a blind kind of fashion without being able to test it.  (less than ideal by a long shot).

I am supposed to send the files to the technical contact, who will then plug them into the site and find out if they work or not, send me back something to then troubleshoot any last little bugs, which I then would have to correct and send back again.

Well, long story short, the technical contact disappeared.  I don’t know if he took another job, contract or if some how we have just been missing each other.

So the back and forth stopped on the project, I was waiting for something back several months ago, and before you know it, actually you do know it because I just dropped the hint, several months had gone by and the project had officially stalled.

Now, the thing is I had the project 95% done.  I just had a couple little questions about direction on a visible graphic or something.

So I have this project mostly done, but have no way to deliver it basically, not to mention put the last 5% of polish on it. 

Now, the new year is coming and I want to wrap this project up in a nice pretty bow and put it behind me.  So yesterday, I dug into it.  Picked up the pieces and started to organize it for delivery to my non-technical client so that my client can try and do something useful with it regardless of whether they have a replacement technical contact or not.

Here’s the thing.  (What thing?  Why do people always talk about ‘the thing’ and why is it important to know where the thing is?)

One of the small elements of this project (then) was to create a blog where the clients email newsletter could be published.  Headlines would also then be ‘fed’ over to the main site so that people checking in to the main site, could see the latest updates as they needed to.

As part of the project, I was to setup this blog and upload a dozen or so of the newsletters, and the client would then take it from there once the site was live.  Well, since this thing has been stalled, the newsletters have been coming out almost every day for months.

Now by the deal we had, I could just turn it over to them with the blog from way back when, but I have a feeling that if I do that they’ll probably give up on the blog all together.  So to help move things along and make it easier for the client to pick up the pieces on this stalled project, I spent most of the night last night, uploading every single news letter onto the blog.  I worked my way from April all the way through the end of October.  (still have November and December to do).

So today (after I finish writing this article) I’m going to get the rest of these loaded up and hopefully turn this over to my client on Monday, zipped up in a nice big package, ready for unzip and upload to their site.  I hate it when projects get stalled out, but it does happen from time to time.  I’ve got a lot of very different projects kicking off in the new year, and really want to clear out all the 08 projects so that I can get on track with the new stuff.

So there you have it!