When it All Comes Together

So, I manage a team of 15 developers. We write business applications to streamline and simplify business processes. To some people this doesn’t sound exciting, but let me tell you what really excites me! I get my greatest satisfaction when I see the programmers, who understand code and the technical aspects of how computers work, begin to understand the process of business, and how to make things work better.

Recently, we were revising one of our applications to handle a new process, a process we had never anticipated before. In some ways it’s a simple process, a way to assign and track attendees when one of our sales people buys season tickets for some event or game. It could be a Chicago Cubs season ticket package, or a Ravinia concert series. In any case, my company pays for tickets for some event before we know who is attending. We are responsible for accurately keeping track of who we spend money on.

Our current application for keeping track of this works fine for a single event. You simply add the event to the system for reimbursement, submit it, and after the event is over you can add the names of the people who attended. If you don’t, the system nags you until you do. Works like a charm. If the event has multiple games or concerts it becomes a little more complex. It’s even more complex when you want other people to fill in the attendee’s names – and don’t want them to have access to the details of your original submission.

So one of my developers built a second website that reads the database of all multi-event reimbursement requests, and it allows others to manage the maintaining of attendees for each event.

This system is in the testing stage right now, and I was just reading emails between the developer and the tester, and the developer is really understanding the business need and what the users really do, and how this will benefit our users. I was so excited that I was thinking to myself, “I love it when it all comes together”!

Our developers and business users are a team. They work together to accomplish the same goal – to make our company the best at what it does, to help our company to do what others can’t, and to be as efficient with our time as possible.

It’s a great feeling when I can observe this kind of thing happening. I hope you have the opportunity to see this happening where you work! Have a great weekend.