Delays - very often, uncontrollable

Posted by Jad on July 17, 2007

In my last post, I said I would start posting more frequently after being absent for a while and here I am, 7 days later, with no posts to show.

I haven’t been procrastinating, nor have I been making more changes to the application’s plan, no - I was recovering from an unexpected surgery!

Aside from affecting the project’s timeline, this hospital stay gave me time to take a couple steps back from the development/planning side of things. Time I spent refreshing my memory with books like Building Scalable Web Sites (by Cal Henderson) and Prioritizing Web Usability (by Jakob Nielsen and Hoa Loranger).

A couple of the things that got either setup, approved or coded during my absence:

  1. New company (legal documents, bank account, etc.)
  2. A new Google Adwords API account (GAA) - never heard back from them concerning the old account’s inquiry.
  3. A new Yahoo! Search Marketing API (YSMA) sandbox account.
  4. 75% of the data cleansing classes we need.

Lesson of the day:

Early in the development process, having a detailed plan (no matter if you know that delays will occur), combined with taking action on simple third party requests (placing orders, registering accounts, etc.), helps keeping things rolling when you encounter unexpected events or delays.