Gerry Doerksen of Client Insight

Client Insight performs customer satisfaction surveys and analyzes long-term trends in results for their corporate clients. These are businesses that care about how they've treated their customers, and understand how important customer satisfaction is for word-of-mouth marketing.

Gerry started with a simple database that worked well in the beginning, but as the business grew and the requirements became more complex, setting up questionaires for new clients and pulling the data back out for analysis became more and more time consuming.

What he needed was to spend more time performing surveys, and be able to pull out specific sets of data to see meaningful results without having to manually apply his proprietary performance calculations.

I was able to significantly reduce the time Gerry spends on maintenance tasks and give him the tools to provide more meaningful data to his clients. With the extra time available, he can focus on impressing his clients with his insight into their performance.

Client Card Solutions

Client Card Solutions came up with a unique marketing service and business plan. Their clients didn't have the time to write newsletters or keep in touch with their customers regularly, so Client Card Solutions set up a greeting card mailing program.

At regular intervals or on special occasions (holidays, birthdays, anniversaries) they would send out greeting cards with personalized messages. This was an excellent way for businesses to stay in touch with their customer base.

Next, they decided to sell business licenses instead of running the business themselves.

Now they needed software to manage the complex scheduling tasks - multiple clients with multiple customer lists all with different mailing dates and special occasion dates, with accurate reports showing what had been sent out and what was upcoming. It also had to keep track of total mailings locally so the business owners could bill their clients accurately, and remotely so Client Card Solutions could tally and bill for royalties.

With such a diverse group of business owners scattered all over the country, the software also needed to be simple to use to reduce tech support costs.

The final software required only 4 hours of training and was comprehensive enough to run the entire business, from initial client contact to final billing, and reported directly to the online system built for Client Card Solutions to manage the entire system nationwide.

TransAlta Corporation

TransAlta is a power generation and wholesale energy marketing company operating throughout North America. I have worked on many projects for TransAlta, but the most significant example of my work was for one of their smaller departments.

The transmission line maintenance team kept track of all their power lines in a small database that had been built years ago. It had gotten to the point where it was overwhelmed with the amount of data that had built up and had become so slow it was almost unusable.

Their plan was to build a new application from scratch, and they budgeted for six months of development.

Since the existing software already had most of the features they needed, the first task was to look it over with the end users, make a list of all the features it already had, and add the new features they'd like to see.

In doing this, I realized there was nothing wrong with their software except for some design issues with the database itself. So I proposed a new solution - fix the existing system and add the new features instead of building from scratch.

The final result - faster software that met all their requirements and savings of three months of development time. With everybody involved in the project - me as the developer, the project manager, the software architect, remote users that had to travel back to the office for meetings and updates - we saved approximately $80,000 in development costs for the company.

There was an additional personal benefit as well. This was the first project at TransAlta for the new project manager, and coming in so far under budget strapped rocket engines to his career there. Building on this success, he now heads high-level projects and is one of their senior managers.

The Client Who Shall Not Be Named

This was one of my more 'interesting' projects. I was hired by a consulting group in the US to work on a project for one of their clients. They didn't have the particular technical expertise needed, so they contracted the work out.

The project was similar to the TransAlta one described above - an old system that had gotten too slow to use.

I was working directly with the client and, again, proposed a solution to fix the system instead of rebuilding from scratch. This system didn't require any new features, so the savings were even higher. From an initial six-month estimate, I cut the work down to one month.

And was fired for doing so.

The client was thrilled. The consulting group, however, was not, because they lost a huge chunk of development revenue.

I chose to look out for the interests of the client above all else. I did a job I was proud of, and can live with the final result.