This client, a Fortune 500 company, needed to centralize all their courses into one flexible portal. Unfortunately the internal team which started the project had gotten distracted onto various tasks – and now it was the 11th hour and the project was due in three weeks time.

The timeline for this complete software application was brutal, but we knew we had the skills and the client was in a spot. (Lets face it, small companies like ours complement large corporations. We can mobilize quicker and ask a lot more of ourselves then can be expected in a Fortune 500 corporate setting.)

Here is what we had to do. We were requested to write the application in ASP (Active Server Pages) with an MSSQL database, but beyond that the rest was up to us.

We needed to define the functionality. Defining the functionality required quickly interviewing stakeholders and nailing down the goals of the project. The urgency of the timeline actually helped us in this instance – everyone knew there was not a moment to lose.

We had to design two interfaces, and make both simple to use. One was for administrators who needed to access the back end. The Administrators could add job families, sub-job families, and position titles under a sub-job family. Then, when adding a new course, the administrator could assign it to any level of job type, where all the lower jobs would inherit its parent’s properties. As soon as a course is assigned to a job type, anyone whose job falls under that would see it in their list when they logged on to the portal

The other interface was the front end for employees to access. After finding what category their ‘job family’ belonged to and how long they had been on the job, they were then directed to the trainings available to them.

Beyond ASP and a MSSQL database we also needed to be in full coherence with the technical requirements set by the client’s infrastructure. The code needed to be clean and well structured such that our client’s internal team could easily update the product – which they have.

The benefits of this project have been concrete. Employees can easily find valuable courses which exist but up to now they did not know how to access. Administrators can easily add courses or assign courses to different job types. We used Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator to design the user interface and graphic elements and ASP (Active Server Pages) for the content management application itself.