Implementing the Design
By late March, we were kicking the project into high gear. For some of us, Midcom was getting more than 50% of our time, and we had a love/hate relationship with the Midcom Guy at this point. We tried to stick to our task schedule, but we always left ourselves open to adjustments. I think one of the reasons for our success was that we looked at the overall project instead of looking at just the individual tasks. If one particular item wasn't finished by its due date but two others were completed ahead of schedule, we celebrated a victory. We knew some items would come down to the wire, and planned for that, but we kept the final goal in mind, and tried to avoid becoming too bogged down with the details.
In hindsight, one of our mistakes was relying heavily on our lead Lotus developer, whose time with us was limited; she was going on maternity leave soon, and was already having periodic mild contractions! She was the only one who really knew Designer and HTML well enough to make our shared system work. The other Lotus developers on our team didn't really even know Designer, since they worked mainly with Notes, and I had never even seen Designer prior to that point. We had to implement a plan of action fast. We decided that I should get Lotus Designer on my system, and make it my new best friend. Luckily, I'm completely self-taught when it comes to computers and coding, so I have no fear of trying or learning something new; we might easily have been dead in the water with a different developer who couldn't learn Designer quickly, and we should have planned better. Fortunately, my HTML experience, and our pulling together as a team, was enough to get us through the launch.