My take on all the Fanball problems

[Plymouth]

There are lots of problems out there, this is not going to be fixed in one day. I feel for you Greg but to be honest this is a heck of a mess and it will take some time and money to fix. To be honest you guys brought this on yourselves by trying to do too much too soon and thinking you could put it all in with no negative customer impact. There have been signs all along that their was trouble ahead but you guys were too busy selling and you forgot what made you so good to begin with, customer service.



Here is what I think should be done:



1. Fanball needs to step up and say they are aware they have numerous problems. Take a step back, take a deep breath and try to deal with one issue at a time.



2. An 800 number should be provided for players to call in their issues and talk to a real person, leaving notes on a message board is bush league.



3. Some one at Fanball needs to be designated as in charge of all the issues and he needs to prioritize the issues as they come in. This same person assigns the IT team which issues need to be worked and in which order.



4. Fixes have to be applied systematically after some diligent testing. Fixes can not be thrown in willy nilly or they will mess up what may be working correctly now. Applying fixes on the fly to a live web site is like changing the fan belt when the motor is running, damn near impossible. Quality and not quantity is what counts here.



5. Enhancements should all be tabled until all the problems are fixed.



6. All reported issues should be listed on the web site so that everyone knows they have been reported. Put this on your front page, not on the message board.



7. Each day until all problems are fixed you hold a conference call on a 800 number and update all the players that call in to that number the status of each issue.



8. You should be running a "crisis room" 24 hours a day until all the issues are resolved.



9. Making excuses and saying how hard you are all working to resolve this issues does no good, it only irritates the players, the players want to see results.



10. Since you have all these issues, the best thing you can do now is to COMMUNICATE. You can not communicate TOO much.



11. If you don't have the staff to do this, you better look at hiring some temps to help you.



12. The IT techs are probably working their butts off but that is not necessarily a good thing. They need to work smart, not work 24 hours straight. That is where problem management is critical.



There are probably several other things I could add here but this is enough for now. Just remember that right now you have to focus on fixing the problems, the "blood letting" and review of what the heck happened should take place after everything is running again.



Thanks,

John

[Plymouth]

Oh, one more thing. Firefox seems to work for some things that IE does not work for. It is a good thing to tell players that Firefox is a "temporary work around" to the problem but you should also be telling them that you will fix the problems so that IE does work. People that are not regular users of Firefox usually have a good reason for not using Firefox.

[The Bru Crew]

My first project in my first class of web programming had to work on any browser...

[flex]

4. Fixes have to be applied systematically after some diligent testing.

[/QB]Diligent? At this point I'd take any kind of testing at all because it's obvious testing is not part of their development process.