Review on Upstatement by Eric Pavelko

This tool was developed by a third-party contractor, not our internal IT team. They did not use any of our systems, nor our processes. It took three months from the initial quote, to a working prototype, and another month to launch. In the meantime, we paid the contractor $80k. When it launched, the developer promised he'd fix bugs within 24 hours. He never did. It still crashed at least once a week. He said he'd add features, but they never materialized. At the end of the beta period, he gave us a list of features to add to our site. Most of these features weren't added for months, if ever. After a few months of being in production, he finally fixed a bug, but he didn't actually implement the new code. Instead, he put in placeholder text. For a couple weeks, we saw a progress bar on the homepage, indicating that the new code was being built, but we never actually saw the new code. Eventually, after several weeks of waiting, he rolled out the new version of the site, but the new version contained numerous bugs. A month later, he rolled out yet another version.