iDone

OK, iPhone finally launched.  My project is done.  The war room is over.  The 15 hour days are over.  I get to go home tomorrow.

iPhone has been the most challenging project I have ever worked on.  The worst part has been not being able to really say much about it.  Until now anyway.  :)

In case you are not a regular reader (not that I have had time to be a regular writer lately), I work for AT&T.  And no, that does not make me inherently evil, despite what you might have read on the Internet.   Anyway, my project was to work on the team developing training for all 17,000 AT&T wireless retail emplyees.  Now normally, this would be no problem at all for me.  I do big projects all the time, and do them pretty well most of the time.

This time though, was difficult.  I officially refer to the iPhone project as a Tale of Two Projects, for it was indeed the best of times, and the worst.

To begin with, I should never have been on the project in the first place.  I work for the Wireline side of the house.  Mobility (Cingular) has it's own training department and it's own training designers (not to mention it's own marketing, it's own Sales Ops, it's own IT department, etc etc etc).  Anyway, just before we reached a point where the training needed to be under development (February), Mobility started one of it's largest training projects ever.  Once they had committed to it, there was no going back, so, incredibly, they were short staffed to tackle iPhone training.  Enter the monkee.  I was loaned to Mobility.  But, I had to accept the project without knowing what it was because, back then, it was pretty much verboten to even say iPhone aloud in a company building.  You think I am kidding about that last sentence, but I am not.  For the first four weeks I was on the project, I couldn't even list it in my time management program.  I had to list it as Project  X and only my boss knew what it was.  Anywho, I accepted the project and found out it was iPhone.  Let me tell you that that was a true high point for me.  Not only was I the only person in all of (landline) AT&T training working on iPhone, I was close to being the only person from landline PERIOD working on iPhone.

So, I signed my NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreement), and entered the secretive world of the iPhone.  Let me tell you, EVERYTHING was a secret on this project.  Compounding that issue was Apple's reluctance to share all the details with us.  So, while I knew quite a few secrets early on, like the self-activation, the price of the plans, and lot's of technical data, there were other things I found out at the same time you all did, such as YouTube.  Since one of my training pieces was a wbt (web-based training) about just how cool iPhone was, it was quite frustrating to have some of the cool features held back from me.  But, we got through it anyway.

And, there were some pretty cool moments.  I had a meeting in Cupertino with none other than the infamous Bob who starred in all those demo videos.  I was encouraged to spend time trolling the mac rumor sites.  I have to tell you that some of the best times we had on this project was in reading all the theories and rumors that weren't even close to the truth.  I also got to work with a number of folks from Apple.  They are a pretty cool group and very talented, if a little paranoid at times.  Good folks though.  I also got to work with a lot of Mobility people I would never have otherwise met.  They are also a good group of folks, although they work too **** many hours.  Plus, Mobility HQ is a pretty doggone nice building.

But, there were also the not-so-fun times.  I haven't had a complete day off since mid-May.  I have worked well past midnight way too many times.  I've had to tell friends over and over that I was sorry I couldn't tell them anything.  Then there were the leaks.  If you trolled any of the rumor sites, then you undoubtedly saw several different AT&T training manuals and whatnot shown on them.  As cool as it kind of was to see something you'd contributed to become such a hot commodity, it was not cool at all to know that someone else had broken rules you had kept.  Oh well, doesn't matter now. 

So, to those of you who bought one, thanks for the business.  To those of you who bought one and experienced any kind of trouble at all, please accept my apology and understand that we were all working very hard to avoid issues in the first place and also to fix them as soon as possible when they cropped up.  Our work to rectify issues certainly didn't satisfy a few crabby bloggers, but believe me, it wasn't for lack of effort.  I have spent the week at Mobility headquarters in Atlanta, and let me tell you that there were a whole pile of us there well into the wee hours of the morning every night this week.

Finally, the best thing about Project iPhone is that it's over and I get to go home.  It was a wild ride at times, and I'm looking forward to some well-deserved R&R.  :)