A lot of this sounds very familiar. I was working on the in-house tools doing the same thing for a very big VFX house from 2012-2018. Early on in that job, we o

A lot of this sounds very familiar. I was working on the in-house tools doing the same thing for a very big VFX house from 2012-2018. Early on in that job, we only really had one pair of tools for production management - one for the project planning (a big Gantt chart) and the other for timesheeting. There was nothing really in place for the artists to use to know what was going on and as such their willingness to enter timesheets was pretty low. In order to drive awareness, reduce work for coordinators and generally try to help everyone, I was made lead to bootstrap a new app in 2014 called... ShotGrid. It did help to a degree, it was still mainly only used by coordinators, but helped them do their work slightly more efficiently. We went down that rabbit hole for a while, but still, the artists lacked good tools for connecting with their PMs. Fast forward to 2016/2017 and my team was sectioned off to completely redesign and rebuild the entire project management tool suite, with the help of some external contractors. Years went by as we did the research, design, technical investigations and review. It was a genuine real struggle to get anyone in the company to engage with us and talk about what they wanted in the product; they'd much rather just struggle on with the existing tools (including endless Excel sheets) and turn their focus to actually doing VFX instead. I left the company in 2018 amid a lot of frustration about nothing being progressed. I heard about 9 months later that the entire project had collapsed and I think they were then heading towards implementing ShotGun instead. Which now, ironically, is apparently to be renamed ShotGrid. I'm taking that as a huge coincidence, but it's nice to know that some of the success I had in that industry lives on in name alone.