What if you don’t believe in your Project?
I am struggling with yet another work dilemna — am I the biggest complainer lately or what?
Have you ever been asked to do something with full knowledge that that is the wrong thing to do? I’m in that situation right now. And we’re spending LOTS of dollars and euros to do it.
For example, we’re co-developing part of our web-based web registration process. My team is doing the backend, while the team elsewhere is doing the front-end. They have put into place some business rules that make no sense:
- Different customers can have the same e-mail address. And if they do, they must have a unique password in order to uniquely address them. Believe it or not, Amazon has this model.
- At login, they want to be sure they know that you are the one who REALLY has that e-mail address, so they want to scan the entire database for duplicates. All this in order to force you to update your information in the database so that THEY (we) can have an accurate address to send e-mail to.
I think the people who have conceived of these rules are so misdirected. What we want to do is make it easy and painless for our customers to register with us. Then once they do, they should be able to get in easily and without a wait. We want to be selfless for the most part to enhance their experience. As it is now, we selfishly impose our business rules and make them wait while we perform our housekeeping.
So, my opinion is that while the sponsors believe we are building a system that will net us more consumer registrations, in fact we are doing the opposite. My source of pain is that I have no channel to the sponsor to ask if they really know what they are doing.
Its stuff like this that makes it hard for me to bear to work the overtime necessary to meet a deadline. In my opinion, we are better off the longer that this stuff does not go online. Sad, but true.