By Jud Wolfskill, Wolfskill Consulting LLC, jud@wolfskillconsulting.com, cell 857.891.5764
Many people don’t know what custom software is. I’ve been building it for over 20 years, but my parents still don’t understand what I do for a living.
Folks know what spreadsheets and email software look like; they know how to book flights and order clothes online. They may have phones and tablets with all kinds of apps on them. But they may not know how to envision an application built to follow the way they work.
I thought case studies might help: specific examples where custom software saves time and money. Users don’t have to conform the way they do their jobs to the requirements of particular software. Instead, we build software to fit how users do their work.
Our first example in this series is a union training center. Union training centers provide instruction for union members.
Are they a school? Are they an organization with memberships? Do they track work and pay? I asked myself and the staff at a union local training center these questions. This is one of my favorite aspects of my job: I get to be a kind of anthropologist and learn about how people do their work.
The answer was “yes” to all the above questions. The union local provides training like a school, offering classes and field days in how to operate large machinery and many other subjects. They record details of membership, such as whether someone is an apprentice or journeyperson. Tracking who is available to work and where people work now, the staff help apprentices and members get jobs.
The organization accepts applications for an apprenticeship program. The staff track the stages of evaluating applicants, making decisions about who will make up a class of students for a particular year. Staff members need to know not only who has enrolled in field training in cranes but also who has a Commercial Driver’s License (CDL).
When I first met the staff, they had an Access database designed for them years ago. It was slow and only allowed one user at a time. I don’t know much about its origins, but a custom database makes sense here: As an organization, they don’t fit a particular mold, and so don’t fit a particular off-the-shelf product. They could have shoehorned their work into, say, educational software or membership software, but off-the-shelf software is often expensive and requires changing the way folks work.
The union training center needed an application that would offer good performance and allow multiple staff members to use it at the same time. The Access database served as a good prototype. Talking through how it worked with the staff, I learned a lot about their workflow. Rebuilding the system in FileMaker, we accomplished performance and user goals while adding features they hadn’t previously enjoyed, such as reporting on when licenses and certificates expired.