services for hire Major project ending, available mid-October 2011

[Vaughan]

Hello

I'm just finishing up a major project for a client and I'll be available for new work from early October 2011.

The project was the development of a new business management system for a performing arts company. Idea of scale: the solution manages 3,500+ active students, 2,500+ active accounts, 250+ active courses, 100+ active staff; 18 active venues. It has sent over 100,000 e-mails since Dec 2010 and has managed over 11,500 staff bookings since July 2011.

It has been a HUGE success and was extended from the original 6 months to almost 12 months because the return on the investment for the client was immediate and substantial. Although the original brief was to simply "develop a database" it became quickly apparent that many of the business processes were inefficient and overly complex. I worked very closely with the Business Improvement Manager to develop and implement new processes, then built a database to support them.*

One of the keys to the success and the speed of the development has been the adoption of agile-like methodologies, the most important being a 2-week development cycle followed by a 1-week break. The new functionality is put into PRODUCTION at the end of each cycle. During the 1-week break the client decides the goals for the next development cycle. The goals are prioritised and aligned to the immediate needs of the business.** The break between cycles means that each time I come back I'm starting out with fresh eyes on the problem. (It also means I am able to support my other valued clients.)

The solution incorporates accounts management, course and staff scheduling, venue and room bookings. It integrates with the company's existing web-based enrolment and customer enquiry systems and provides data exports to facilitate the batch processing of payments to electronic banking systems. It is used by 8 to 12 staff concurrently and its ease of use has enabled many tasks that were complex and time consuming to be performed by several lower-level administrative staff. Many tasks that previous took 2 or 3 days to perform have been automated and can be performed in hours.

If anybody has an interesting project in Sydney, Australia please contact me by e-mail. I will also entertain offers to work in UK, Europe and USA for a minimum of 12 months beginning in February 2012. My salary expectations are AUS$120k pa or equivalent.

Regards

Vaughan

[email protected]

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* An example: the business had major problems handing enquiries and converting these to enrolments. Client enquiries could be made by e-mail, phone or via the web site. Often they were of the form "We're not interested this year but would like to be notified next year." They were being inconsistently stored in various parts of the database, and while entering them was easy, it was impossible getting them out again in any meaningful way. Consequently many were being lost. Customer service was suffering and opportunities were being missed. The obvious solution would be to make a database specifically to store enquiries. WRONG. The solution was to treat the enquiries as advanced enrolments. Instead of making a note somewhere that somebody needs to do something next year, and noting what the something was, just ENROL THEM INTO NEXT YEAR'S COURSE RIGHT NOW. Do it once, no double-entry of data. No more missed opportunities. And even better: no need to add any more functionality, this solution required no additional development to implement, only a change of business process. (I love my job.)

** I'm sometimes asked "Why doesn't the database do <X>?" The answer is "Because nobody has requested it yet. Put it on the list and we'll consider it." This is just-in-time development. Things only get done if and when they are needed. No development effort is wasted.