Scout went back to their old design already
- Thread starter o_hacker
- Start date
Steve Robertson says the move back is temporary, only until the other site is "operational". They should have done that in the beginning, but even when it's working like it's supposed to nobody's going to like it.
I'm not sure which site is worse...
That being said, I feel for the guys doing this. I do this sort of thing for a living. This project was obviously a massive failure, probably cost a few million dollars, and they will be living with the issues for years and years to come unless they take a few steps back, which is hard to get executives to do.
Also, this is the sort of thing that could end up tanking Scout. They treated their bread and butter like it was any other site. They are quite obviously missing skilled leadership in the technology side of the house. If sites are hard to use, people will go elsewhere.
That being said, I feel for the guys doing this. I do this sort of thing for a living. This project was obviously a massive failure, probably cost a few million dollars, and they will be living with the issues for years and years to come unless they take a few steps back, which is hard to get executives to do.
Also, this is the sort of thing that could end up tanking Scout. They treated their bread and butter like it was any other site. They are quite obviously missing skilled leadership in the technology side of the house. If sites are hard to use, people will go elsewhere.
I have to agree with you. This site uses VBulletin php which is pretty awesome. I'm thinking about doing an Outdoors site myself and currently doing some research for that project when I can.
They went live and we're going to "iron out the wrinkles" later. Horrid development viewpoint.
I can't imagine being the project manager and not heavily testing each individual site before going hot. Even then they should've just rolled out one site at a time to ensure proper migration.
I can't imagine being the project manager and not heavily testing each individual site before going hot. Even then they should've just rolled out one site at a time to ensure proper migration.
Agree ...
but the 'worse' move was trying to do ANY kind of migration in the MIDDLE of college football season. Any decent risk manager could have told them the the 'rewards' from such a move could NEVER EVER be worth the 'risk.'
but the 'worse' move was trying to do ANY kind of migration in the MIDDLE of college football season. Any decent risk manager could have told them the the 'rewards' from such a move could NEVER EVER be worth the 'risk.'
It's on the high side but not unreasonably so. People don't realize the people time these things take and the amount of technology that has to support it. If they wrote their own message board software from scratch I can see eating up 4mil easy. i run a web development team at my work and I've been doing a fairly simple project (by comparison) and I've had three full time people working 100% on it for 8 months and we are still a month and a half from going live with the first tiny little piece. Once you start getting into framework, security, redundancy, communication and connectivity it just gets bigger and bigger.
vBulletin is an AMAZING piece of software for the cost.
I would have guessed somewhere between 3 and 6, depending on scope and licensing of any software needed to be bundled in. Their site is complex because it is more of a platform for multiple sites that deals with a ton of data and concurrent users. The data migration for this must be pretty intense.
247 really did the right thing by rolling out with a limited feature set, then taking on smaller projects released in iterations, but they had the advantage of starting from scratch. Massive cut-overs like this rarely go well (except when DS is running things, obviously).
Seeing as they released a broke *** POS in the middle of football season, I would guess they meant to release this in the summer and that they are way over budget. Some executive has his tail in a sling over this one and he is pushing to get it live before he gets fired.
247 really did the right thing by rolling out with a limited feature set, then taking on smaller projects released in iterations, but they had the advantage of starting from scratch. Massive cut-overs like this rarely go well (except when DS is running things, obviously).
Seeing as they released a broke *** POS in the middle of football season, I would guess they meant to release this in the summer and that they are way over budget. Some executive has his tail in a sling over this one and he is pushing to get it live before he gets fired.
I'm a fan of Microsoft, but we constantly open tickets with them because they fail to use regression testing on some of the most simple things
That is what I am interested in. I would like to see what they used to complete the migration effort. Unless they used the same back end to support their new design, which wouldn't be out of the picture seeing how they fell flat on their face with their first go live.
With all of these other sites moving to new forums, is SixPackSpeak being run by the Mississippi State Athletic Department? We were the first for big Jumbotrons, hashtags, etc.. now new forums
Y'all are right that this sort of thing can become crippling. What happens is when you get down a road like this and you've spent $2M before you realize - oh crap, this sucks! Problem is that when you tuck your tail between your legs and try and go ask for money to fix it, you get stonewalled so you end up with an inferior product working at about 60% capacity for a few years before everyone realizes it sucks and its hurting revenue and you get to try again.
Been down that road countless times in my company and we're in the middle of doing it again. It amazing to watch how the whole project can get away from those in charge so quickly. One bad design decision and you're FUBARd
Been down that road countless times in my company and we're in the middle of doing it again. It amazing to watch how the whole project can get away from those in charge so quickly. One bad design decision and you're FUBARd