A software development team at a large consulting company struggled with managing change requests (known as CR's). During a normal
week it was common to have 15-20 CR's scheduled. The process for handling all of this scheduling was usually a chain of disorganized
emails. When details about a particular CR were needed, team members had to go searching through old emails. This was time-consuming
and very inefficient.
To alleviate these issues Dan built an application to make managing these CR's extremely simple. At the time the CR was scheduled,
a team member could create a central record in this new application in a matter of seconds. From there anybody from the team could
pull it up and view all of the pertinent details whenever needed.
But there was a second problem. With each CR a specific set of instructions were required. These instructions varied only a small
amount between each CR but required a new document for each. Prior to the development of the CR management tool this was done
by taking old versions of CR instructions and manually editing them. This was both time consuming and extremely error-prone.
To mitigate the issues involved with documentation, Dan built an additional feature to generate the instructions in a single click.
Because these were computer-generated, there were no errors or typos and a huge amount of time was saved.
Ads4Next is a non-profit business based in Abilene, Texas. In 2011 when the site owner approached us, the site was struggling to gain
traction. The version at that time lacked many desired features and the owner needed help understanding what features were needed to
get users engaged.
We conducted extensive customer research by talking directly to current and prospective users to understand how and why they were
using the website, or more importantly, why some had stopped using it. We used this to create a list of desired features such as
mobile device operability, and redesigned the site from the ground up.