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Vitalograph
5.2 Third Party Selection
Development of the website was undertaken by Limerick based design consultancy
Microelectronics Application Centre(MAC). MAC had completed projects for
the company previously and Vitalograph were happy with the quality of their
work.
Following an initial briefing, MAC responded with a
proposal to check they had properly understood the brief.
Once this was done, a full proposal with designs was
submitted to Gary Casey and the steering committee.
MAC built the website infrastructure allowing Vitalograph
to add in content themselves. Although MAC could have
handled the entire project on an ongoing basis, it was
decided that this would be outside the project budget
and thus the decision was taken to do this internally.
Research was undertaken by Vitalograph on web hosting
companies. The research identified all the potential
vendors in Ireland and from there, Host Ireland (www.hostireland.com)
was chosen on the basis of having the most flexible
package at the best price.
5.3 The Project Team
Internal Team
- Gary
Casey, R&D Manager – Casey held overall
responsibility for managing the project and specifying
requirements for the website and technical support
systems.
- Shane
O’Neill, IT Engineer – O’Neil
had hands-on responsibility for IT and ongoing maintenance
for the website. He also undertook training and
was able then to maintain the website internally
without having to incur the costs associated with
having an external supplier provide the service.
External
Team
- Des
Crosby, MAC – MAC is a part of the University
of Limerick. Crosby was responsible for the project
management within MAC.
- Hostireland.com
– Provided web hosting services.
5.4
Timeline and Setbacks
The site will go live as this case is being completed,
a year after it was handed over to the team in Vitalograph.
On handover, the site was set-up on an internal web
server but, at that time, lack of staffing internally
meant that the team was unable to make the site public.
Commented Casey, “There were always more urgent
things to be done – we bit off a little more than
we could chew”. The development of the site was
outsourced to MAC and this lulled the team into a false
sense of the level of work required to get the site
live. All content had to be written and revised and
the site had to be populated with the required information.
There was a lot of work after the design was completed.
This work may only have taken a full time resource three
or four weeks to complete but without that resource,
the project took far longer. This development wasn’t
a key area of focus and thus often took 2nd place.
5.5
Budget
The project came in on budget from a cost point of view. That said, the
amount of man hours involved in the project went over budget by four or
five times. “We didn’t fully understand what we were getting into
so didn’t realise the amount of effort it would take”, said Casey.
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