Project management varies little from industry to industry. That's the wonderful part of the profession. I could manage the construction of a building to the development of a software platform to the design of a document to put in front of congress.
The stages are the same, the risk factors may be different. But it's a PMs job to step up and handle those risk factors. And accept the blame when the project isn't on time or on budget.
They've directly said it'd be done multiple times. This is just the first time they've given us a concrete date rather than a time frame.
It should not, in any situation, take 60+ days to release a completed roster where most of the edits are shuffling lineups within a dedicated database or application.
If EA would open lines of communication and say:
"
Here's the date. This is what we plan to providing by that date. Here's the reasons for the date and the delays up to this point. This is what we're doing to address those reasons."
For instance:
"
The target date for the roster release is November 2nd. We plan to release updates to ratings (based on current play thus far), player numbers, lineups and team assignments only (but we will do this for every league in the game). We will not be addressing equipment in this release. We apologize for the delays to the roster release so far. We did not anticipate the licensing issues with the CHL and how this licensing would affect the 10-day rule for allowing teams reassign players from the pro team to the minors. Further, the layoffs cut our dedicated roster staff from 5 to 2, so our workload doubled. We are sorry this hit you as a consumer, but we hope the roster will eventually earn us some good will back. Moving forward, we are going to reassign some additional resources to the roster team and work through the weekend to ensure we can meet this new deadline. Again, we apologize."
People would be happier. They should do this for the roster file AND the tuners AND the patches.
Instead, they stay hidden, let people fling mud and have the EA sunshine pumpers come out and defend them to the bitter end even if the business practice is shady.