An educational training firm has just launched a highly-publicised business training website that is failing, and now its guru is publicly distancing himself from it.

QWR EDUCATIONAL Training decided, at a board meeting in December 2007, that the time was right to move into business training. Having started four years ago with online courses for primary-school children, it moved into the secondary schools sector two years later. At the time it had explored ways of entering the business training market, but it seemed difficult to crack. There were so many other firms already involved.

Finally the firm's chief executive, Shane Murphy, came up with an answer. He attended a recent conference in Brighton with Dan Jones, the chief executive of one of the UK's leading retail giants and something of a business guru.

Jones told him that he was due to retire in the spring but was eager to do something in the field of education. However, while he was willing to work with QWR - for a substantial fee - he was not going to get involved in what he referred to as "the rubber chicken seminar circuit".

That's where Murphy spotted the opportunity. QWR had been trying to expand its online training courses and Jones was just the man to launch a new business training site.

The idea was simple: Jones would be the face of the new service; he would provide key online training messages and design a few exam questions as part of the courses.

Murphy's team would look after the rest. The in-house trainers at the company's offices on Dublin's Grand Canal Street would create the course material, based on Jones's advice, but he would be required to have final sign off on it.

Murphy was adamant that the launch would have to coincide with Jones's official retirement. That way they could get plenty of free publicity on the coat tails of the business coverage of Jones's departure.

With the agreement of the rest of the board, the project was given the green light. The online manager, Godfrey Simons, was co-opted to lead a project team that would have three months to get the site up and running. It was a relatively tight timeframe but things would be moving pretty soon.

The first week was taken up with Simons e-mailing the various departments asking for timelines on their various parts of the projects. From these he compiled a schedule and made sure everybody knew what they had to do and by when.

A month into the project came a crunch meeting with Murphy. He was just back from London where he had met Jones to discuss what the site should offer. Simons was surprised to hear that the initial plan for a relatively simple online tutorial website had evolved into something considerably more ambitious.

They now wanted to include a full archive of relevant training manuals, weekly updates from Jones and a personalisation option for individual users as they logged on.

He wondered how his already overstretched team was going to manage all the extra work required. But if the chief executive wanted it, Simons was determined to deliver. He reckoned if he could manage this project successfully, his next promotion would not be a long time coming. The problem was the extra work was going to eat into the two weeks he had allowed at the end for testing.

Making contact with Jones was also starting to prove difficult in the run up to his retirement. He seemed to be permanently out to lunch.

However, none of this was to be Simons's problem much longer. Murphy, impressed by his eagerness to take on new challenges and in desperate need for someone to head the firm's new Scottish operations, offered Simons the job. Young and single, he jumped at the opportunity to move to Glasgow.

His quiet-spoken deputy, Sarah O'Neill, who had been with the company for just a year, was given the chance to replace her boss. Within hours she discovered how wrong she was to take on the role. It was her first big promotion but already she felt she was sinking under the pressure.

The problem, as O'Neill saw it, was that the project was being driven not by the creation of a successful online service, but by a non-negotiable deadline. Jones had already set his retirement for March 31st and the board had decided to tie the launch of their online tutorial scheme to this date.

She thought Simons was probably right to accept the challenge of a three-month deadline. However, once Jones started ignoring calls and proving difficult to work with, Simons should have objected to any new applications being added to the online system without an extension of the deadline.

O'Neill had tried to limit new additions but every time she did so, she felt she was being unfavourably compared to Simons. He was a doer; she was being regarded as negative and uncooperative. The marketing department organised a launch party for March 31st in the Shelbourne Hotel. As the champagne flowed, O'Neill tried to look as if she was enjoying herself. But she felt sick to her stomach. The site wasn't working the way it should and in the morning she feared all hell would break loose as customers started to encounter problems.

For a start Jones had not bothered to check and send back at least half the tutorial material that was carrying his name. It had been couriered over to him weeks ago and O'Neill had tried, right up to this morning, to contact him but he was avoiding her calls and not replying to e-mails.

She had to make the choice: leave the material out and launch a site that was missing big parts of the course offerings, or put it up live online and hope that Jones was happy with the content.

She opted to include it on the site, having gone through the material herself to ensure it made some sense. That was not the only problem. Her technicians told her it would be at least three weeks before the archive would be working. As for the personalisation, that could take months.

For now the site offered the basic training package, but had few of the fancy extras that dominated the marketing campaign. She was satisfied the course material would be fine, but the site layout was far short of the online design standard QWR was used to.

The next morning, O'Neill went to work with a sense of dread. She was tempted just to stay on the Dart all the way to Greystones, instead of getting off at Grand Canal Dock.

Sure enough, she had hardly hung up her coat when an irate Murphy was on the phone demanding that she come to his office.

He looked grim as she sat down, and he got straight to the point. Customers had already been on expressing their disappointment about the site, he said.

What's more, a few minutes ago, a radio journalist had rung, claiming that he had just been on to Dan Jones who, when quizzed about problems on the website, had distanced himself from it.