A regional VP at Choice Homes felt like they had an internal communication problem related to the customer's choice of colors, cabinet finishes, and upgrades. This is profitable add-on business, but only if you get it right the first time. Often, the customer would tell the salesman what they wanted, but the information would go through a manager for approval before getting to the construction superintendents so that they could order materials and so that they could get the right ones. The company's processing environment was Office, with a lot of Exchange and Access. We eventually settled for an Excel Template on a network drive, and emailing the information to the stakeholders so that everyone would have the same documentation. We initially used it in one community, but within a year four of the other twenty community managers had adopted it. Also, in 2000, one of the community managers brought me in to write an application to take the color selections info and use it in the adjustment of the standard budget for the job.
Most interesting business challenge: In researching the business problem, I went to the sales offices. I found many different vintages of price lists for upgrades. These documents were not neat looking, and the prices were definitely not all the same. It became clear that we needed an application that would have central control. We held JAD meetings, with two goals: first and foremost to give everyone a say in an effort to get unity of buy-in; secondly to see if there were parts of the problem scope that hadn't been included from the beginning. We set up an easel and covered the walls with ideas of what people thought the problems were, and what people thought we could do about them. On of the most interesting business aspects was that the manager wanted to base his selling price for many of the upgrades on his costs, and left me free to learn as much as I could about how different costs behaved. Flooring, brick, mini-blinds, and other items fell into behavior classes - same price for all floor plans, different price for each floor plan, or groupings in between. Finally, the manager required that the application to allow him to change the margins and to change the level of rounding of the final prices when he felt that it was appropriate.
Most interesting technical challenge: making the application flexible enough. We settled on Excel instead of MS Access because the staff was familiar with Excel, and they didn't want to have any delays caused by database or programming oversights when they were sitting in front of the customer. Each customer's information went into an excel worksheet, and then we periodically ran an MS Access application to read and summarize those worksheets for management.
Buzzwords: JAD, MS Office, Workflow.