Don't let that experience sour you too much about working for a megacorp. It sounds you got quite a crap deal.
The worst project you can be on is one:
1. With no clear goals, he has no idea what he wants.
2. No support team; basically, like you said, you're the team, and even worse, you're "green".
It sounds like you got one of those "pie in the sky" projects; there's no clear benefit that the CIO can get from this, and if you succeed, he looks awesome; if you fail, he doesn't care, it's one of those "throwaway" projects.
In a megacorp, you have to get into a project which is directly involved in their day to day business, directly contributing to revenue, to get more recognition, resources, and $$$. Get into such a project, or make yours give some visible benefit to the company.
In your example, I'd have tried to pivot it to be a reporting tool; I find that senior management in banking generally have a poor visibility in their business monitoring, current transaction levels etc; this can give clear and visible benefit to the company.
Once you can show the benefits to your Boss and the CEO, the extra help and resources will follow.
I agree. You got handed a pretty sweet opportunity to learn and to shine. The CIO had a goal: he wanted to impress the other executives with an iPhone application. You even had a hint: he liked a news carousel. IMO choosing to build a mobile website instead was a mistake. I would have chosen a "RAD"-style app builder and produced a first version with visual appeal. You'd make him look good, achieve a first win, and become known as "the mobile guy", on the route to become Mobile Development Technical Lead.
The experience itself was invaluable in learning things like this. In the end I actually did ship a product, just one that had nothing to do with mobile.
They needed someone to rewrite a stagnant product they offered their clients. Essentially it was a white-label online wizard for selling accessory products to auto loans. All the sales logic itself was handled by a backend elsewhere, I just wrote a front end for it and tool for quickly creating a custom version with a client's logo and color scheme.
In the end I learned some .Net, some Javascript and even more about working within a large organization. I don't regret that summer at all.
I agree that your tips are great, and would definitely work... but why bother?
It is much easier and satysfying to just work in _normal_ enviroment, with friendly and intelligent people. And without any nerve-wrecking office politics and soul-sucking fluorescent light.
The worst project you can be on is one:
1. With no clear goals, he has no idea what he wants.
2. No support team; basically, like you said, you're the team, and even worse, you're "green".
It sounds like you got one of those "pie in the sky" projects; there's no clear benefit that the CIO can get from this, and if you succeed, he looks awesome; if you fail, he doesn't care, it's one of those "throwaway" projects.
In a megacorp, you have to get into a project which is directly involved in their day to day business, directly contributing to revenue, to get more recognition, resources, and $$$. Get into such a project, or make yours give some visible benefit to the company.
In your example, I'd have tried to pivot it to be a reporting tool; I find that senior management in banking generally have a poor visibility in their business monitoring, current transaction levels etc; this can give clear and visible benefit to the company.
Once you can show the benefits to your Boss and the CEO, the extra help and resources will follow.