Project: On Hold

The project that's been consuming oh-so-much of my time for the last 3 months has just been put on hold.

It's not canned, not yet. The Powers That Be need to re-evaluate the business case. A lot has happened since the project started. The company has new owners for one thing. And we've got a new CIO, and the old one just happened to be the project sponsor. So you can kind of understand the need for a review.

It's just a shame we have to down tools for four weeks for that to happen.

It's not good for morale, or velocity, and will cost more for us to get back up to speed when it starts again - even more if we can't get the original people back.

What's worse is that this is a great project. It's all very forward focused. It intends to be our first consumer facing desktop application. An exciting project for an internet bank, and pretty much the raison d'etre of my team.

On top of that, it's using all the latest technologies; a veritable alphabetti spaghetti of new-ness. We've got .net 3, WCF, WPF and my personal favourite, CardSpace. In fact, this project is less about the actual business functionality, and more about getting this technology live. It's a huge stepping stone for the kinds of projects I want to see delivered.

So if this project does go the way of the dodo, it's going to be not getting CardSpace live that will upset me most. After all, we're going to need it for the next project that needs to talk securely with web services. Not having it takes us back to square one.

It's hard not to feel a little fatalistic right now. But I've got my fingers crossed.