June 14, 2016 at 7:22 am
My good story is the system I'm still proud to have developed. It's a deceptively simple process - onboarding and offboarding employees.
I started this as part of a project back in 2000. Getting all the data I needed would be an ongoing process. Overall I spent 9 years working on hunting down and bringing together as many different system logons as I could and persuading the owners that the process would be a benefit to them.
This system did a whole lot of processing in the background and worked with a really lousy eform system to present supervisors of record the ability to set up their employee access in one place. Hardware, software, and telecom.
I could go into a lot more detail about what it did and how it did stuff. But I will say that once it hit production it passed internal, external, federal, and ISO audit every time it was checked.
I never did get to finish integrating transfers into it before I left.
Even better it was still working years after I left without a single hiccup. Part of it is still running because the new owners of the company (big acquisition) don't have anything that will do the same things.
December 13, 2016 at 6:02 am
A little late but my good story made everyone involved happy so I thought that I'd mention it here.
I wrote a Mail Order System (mainly me but with two colleagues who also did bits too - 3 developers doing about half a dozen projects concurrently :w00t:). When it came to the reporting section the business owner just wanted me to hard code each report. This wasn't an unreasonable idea as the tooling (Sage Retrieve 4GL) made it relatively easy. I suggested that after the four initial reports the client will want many more. I had a good working relationship with the lady running the Mail Order department of our client and a good understanding of their working practices, with this in mind, and against his better judgement, the business owner accepted that I could build a reporting framework and the initial 4 reports as I claimed that I could achieve this just within his budget. I overran a couple of days which wasn't ideal but still the company had made some profit on that module.
A little while later I got a call from the lady running the client's Mail Order department. She needed 3 additional reports for her boss. She needed them really quickly and one of them needed posting out that day (it was 1991 and a 3.5" floppy deployment process). I told her that I would start working immediately on it and make that day's post after quoting her a reasonably substantial amount for each report as if I had to generate each one from scratch (2-3 days work) and she promised that I would have a purchased order by fax within the hour. I got coding and had the first report coded, tested, on the floppy disk, in a jiffy bag and with an invoice ready for posting within 20 minutes. I then got on with the next two reports.
Later that day the business owner came in to the development room very concerned. He had the purchase order fax in hand and he didn't want the client to think that we were overcharging them. I explained that this was the return on investment (I bet I didn't use that term back then) on the reporting framework that the company had invested in. I also said that they were desparate for the quick turnaround. He said something along the lines of it being on my head. The next day I talked the client through the installation of the urgent report and was hugely thanked by the lady who had requested it. Later on the owner of the client called my employer's business owner and thanked him for the quick turnaround and the professional way it was all carried out. The bill wasn't mentioned. It was just paid on time. Everyone was happy.
Gaz
-- Stop your grinnin' and drop your linen...they're everywhere!!!
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