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The way to a team’s heart is with a victory. This ecommerce team had not tasted victory… well, ever. I should know. I was the business owner of this project. It was my marketing plan that was being executed for 2007. It was also my marketing plan that called for a significant improvement in ecommerce capabilities. After all, 2007 was not shaping up to be a good year, and most indicators pointed to a significant downturn in sales for the holiday season over the last year.

Delays in the ecommerce project were choking the company. Instead of being able to implement new and exciting online marketing campaigns, the business was strangled by the limitations of it’s storefront. The original direction for the website had been given in June. The end of July rolled around, and the project status was: “We’re still trying to figure out some things with the database.” I knew things were really in trouble when I asked to see the test website.

“Test website?”

There was no test website. There was no development platform. There was… there was nothing! Two months and nothing. I put the pressure on for another month. This was an important project. It was futile. The lead developer was not capable of grasping the simplicity of the project. Yes, the simplicity.

There were a lot of complex ideas being thrown around. How do we get it to do this? What about this? Yet, the concept is really simple: How do you allow someone to add an item to their shopping cart, give us their credit card, and get it into our order fulfillment system? Somewhere along the lines, the project had become more complex than that.

This is where the first milestone success came from. No, not just from realizing that the project was simple. That’s just and idea. Ideas are worth nothing. Ideas executed are worth millions.

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