The Facilities group at the ST Micro Carrollton site needed to coordinate the status and budgets for a variety of physical plant projects. The project managers took some Microsoft Access classes and then designed their application. I was tasked with developing it in Access 2000. They wanted to accomplish two things - track the status of a project, and track its performance against the budget. The budget tracking was to be compared to the capital assets available for those projects.
Biggest business challenge: reducing the amount of entry required was mission critical. The engineers responsible for managing the projects were not going to spend a lot of time keying project updates into the application. The managers for this development project were very helpful at specifying what information came from which sources, and that allowed us to avoid asking users for information that wasn't available. It was also very important to complete a working project within the budget allocated to the project - there would be no supplemental funding for overruns. The project was completed and installed for less than 100 billable hours - including scoping, specification, coding, testing, installation, and explanation.
Biggest technical challenge: there were two. One was the level of the integration of the database - it was as interrelated as I've encountered before or since. The other was reducing an 11x17 spreadsheet to an 8-1/2x11 page for the primary project review meeting document. Both were iterative processes that eventually produced successful results.
Buzzwords: Microsoft Access, application design, database design, application development..