Delivery of a product taking a long time

Question

Have you ever worked on a development of a product which took a long time to release to public( at most 2 years)?.And, you were working on the same project for the whole time.How did you keep yourself motivated? And, I wonder should delivering a product take such a long time? There are others who have this philosophy- get the product out early, even with bugs( but thats bad, maybe less features but no bugs).Helps in getting feedback, and then react to feedback and deliver.

Answer 1

Large systems can take a lot of time to develop - have you read "The Mythical Man-Month"? Operating systems take years and involve thousands of people. And the motivation is usually milestone-based; the huge task of creating a complete OS is broken down until the individual bits are maybe a few weeks long. Then there is continuous, visible progress.

Also, there is one thing that is even worse--it is working for a long time on a project that is eventually canceled and never sees the light of day. Of course it's hard, especially when the reasons are purely business or political ones, in spite of superior technology. But one has to do his or her best, and hopefully some lessons learned on a failed project will be carried over to the next hugely successful one.

Answer 2

I have worked on long drawn out projects and the motivational factors can become debilitating. The motivations for not having a buggy initial release are obvious. A bad initial release can absolutly murder a program, project, or company. First to market is something to consider when you are in an innovative field but usually that is not the driving factor. The motivation you must find in yourself. If you are learning new skills each and every day feel pride in that. If the motivation factor is really a big issue take it up with management and move to something new. Sticking it out and seeing the end product is a huge motivation in itself. When I was working at IBM someone once told me that he had not worked on a product that shipped in 13 years. He said that his motivation came from his family and the fact that he is constantly learning new things. Even in the failings of those projects he managed to grow and eventually found his passion. It is a good lesson to learn from.

Answer 3

I've actually had a very small project take about two years to be completed, mainly due to a lot of waiting for the customer to provide certain material, as well as some personal factors.

While motivation did become an issue after a while, I found that the best solution was to just dive into the code one day. Once you go to the effort of recalling the whole design once again, it's hard to stop working and let it go again.

Answer 4

I can sympathise with you on this, having been working on the same project for almost 4 years now. Yes, that's 4 years! Keeping motivated can certainly be a problem, especially as I'm mostly working alone, but knowing that there is (finally) an end in sight is something that keeps me going. I have seen the whole project as a learning experience, having tried many new techniques along the way, some of which have failed, others that will be of great benefit to future, smaller projects. I would love to have got the project out earlier with less features, but unfortunately could not get agreement on this. We live and learn...

Answer 5

Just for background: I'm currently working on a project where the project length itself is 1.75 years there was a project before this and will likely have a few afterwards. It still isn't quite public but should be soon. I've been on this project for about 1.25 years. The project is a CMS replacement where the company has nearly 2 dozen websites.

Yes, delivering these kinds of systems can take a long time. Where I work there were ERP and CRM projects that have taken years where the CRM was 2 years and the ERP is still ongoing 2 years later and looking like it may be at least another few years before all the modules are implemented, so this is just fitting into that in a sense.

Every product released will have some bugs or enhancements to be done. However, some systems shouldn't be released with critical bugs, as I doubt you'd want to beta test a new site from your bank or have a company's financial records be on the newest version of something noone knows or even heard the name. Thus, some projects/products/services can take time to get up and running. At times though it does feel like this has been going on for a long time and it isn't going away anytime soon.

Motivation comes from getting those milestones where there is something to show and say, "Hey, we did get this done!" or some similar congratulatory message. Another part to this is that we use an Agile methodology where we have demos every 2 weeks to show functionality which does put a cap on how long we run in the dark in a sense. There is a sense of pride within the team as well the feeling that we want to do this right and proper as way too often we have seen things go up half-baked with poor results that we don't want to repeat.