Crunch time

I work in what can only be described as a pretty cushy office job. Since the pandemic I only need to actually be in the office once or twice a week; the rest of the time I can work from home. The job is engaging but generally not hard - since I've been performing similar kinds of tasks for several years now, I'm pretty good and efficient at them. My co-workers are all a lovely bunch. And my employer is pretty decent, as far as evil global megacorporations go.

However, earlier in the year they decided that our e-commerce website would move to a new platform. This doesn't have any immediate benefit to us as the people managing it, nor to our customers - if anything, there are quite a few downsides at least in the short term. Mainly the project seems to be something to satisfy bean counters and higher-ups who want to save money by having more brands run on the same kind of software, that kind of thing. It's not the most inspiring goal, but understandable.

What was less understandable were the timescales they expected. The first pitch expected the new website to be built and migrated within less than six months. "Haha, no" would be putting it politely. Even the moved target date of 1st of October seemed wildly unrealistic... but they hired a lot of staff over in China who've been working day and night (literally, we've had some calls close to midnight their local time) who seemed to pull off the impossible.

Or have they? We're less than a month away from the supposed new site launch and while a lot has been achieved, there are still so many things that are just not working or kind of broken. We've been asking about the release date for weeks but leadership refuses to commit to a delay, so every day is a frantic crunch of testing things, reporting bugs, then re-testing things, all in hopes of somehow still helping to make that impossible deadline happen.

I know I'm just going to hate the next few weeks regardless of how it goes, and even if we somehow make it, there's still a big risk of our triumphant new site launch turning into an utter mess with all kinds of bugs and issues. And once we cross that line, there's no rolling things back. I worry about how easily so much hard-earned customer trust and loyalty could be shattered within days. I trust everyone I've been working with to do their best, but I don't trust the people at the very top and whose directions we have to follow to make the right calls. I've seen other brands within the larger business be ruined by similar projects gone awry. I just hate the uncertainty more than anything else.