As some of you may know, today is my last day working at [crisis-hit/ailing/beleaguered] (delete as appropriate) Sanctuary Group after 15 months with this. With about 15 minutes to go before I leave, the first website I’ve worked on for them (of any size – I don’t count the wee puff piece three page sites for individual albums and the like) has just gone live.

Robert Plant (Grand Wizardy Bastard and Lord of Elves) has just got a new website. It’s taken 15 months, and in the process has cost him something like 23 grand. It might interest you to know that our quote for it, when we were asked about it, two weeks after I got here, was about 8 grand. But his management went with other people, who did the job badly (and charged for it), then had to come back to us to get it done again. They also hired an outside animator for the flash bits of the new site I’ve just linked to, and hard to pay him almost as much as the rest of the site cost, just for the animated bits, because they didn’t agree an up-front cost with him, and so just got charged at day rate.

Every other major project (about four of them) I have worked on for Sanctuary has got bogged down in the internal politics of the company, and has yet to go live.

So, let’s recap: in a year, I have added one URL to my CV. Everything else was held up by office politics. The one URL I have added cost nearly three times as much as it should have because of management incompetence. I could use my time here to write a “how not to deal with new media” book. This is doubly ironic, as the new media team at Sanctuary are world-class – they’re seriously good and switched on people, who are just hampered by the fact that they’re in service to idiots who fear change, and who won’t take risks or in some cases, decisions.

Thank god I’m going back to agency work, where people actually get things done.

This entry was originally published at my workblog.