Problems & Solutions

PROBLEM:

You are a department or dean’s office at a college or university, and you don’t have an effective way to share information about your faculty. When someone asks for a faculty member’s activities, you have to look in file cabinets, documents, and emails.

You have looked at HR software, but off-the-shelf applications are expensive and don’t fit your needs. They offer elements of what you are looking for–tracking faculty and salaries, for example–but do not capture special considerations in the promotion and tenure process.

When a faculty member is due for promotion or tenure review, you want to be able to review his or her activities quickly and easily.

SOLUTION:

I will build an application for your staff that will track faculty members’

• Ranks and tenure statuses
• Salaries
• Demographics
• Awards
• Departmental affiliations
• Committee involvement
• Courses taught
• Course evaluations
• Publications
• Any other details you would like to have available to you

The app will provide printouts such as

• Teaching schedules by department
• Faculty rosters
• Faculty members available for a given committee
• Charts to show the demographics of new hires or another subset of faculty members

PROBLEM:

You keep much of your organization’s information – contacts and event registrations – on spreadsheets. While each spreadsheet gets circulated to members of the team, it can be hard to find the most recent version. You need a single location where all important information resides.

When one team member learns of a client’s change of address or event registration, you want the team member to update the information and have the change immediately available to everyone.

You’d like to automate tasks, such as sending reminders of upcoming events and certificates for attendees. Plus, you would like to easily compare events in terms of attendance and the breakdown of industries among attendees.

SOLUTION:

After reviewing your spreadsheets and having thorough conversations with staff members, I will craft an application that tracks

• Contacts
• Demographics
• Behavior over time

When staff members open the app, they will arrive at a personalized dashboard that reminds them of upcoming events and allows them to send reminders and certificates.

A section of the application available only to managers will offer charts displaying attendance trends across events.

PROBLEM:

As a business-unit manager at a corporation, you find your staff spending a lot of time performing the same tasks over and over again. They get approvals for pricing and create sales reports in spreadsheets, which require hours of emailing and copying and pasting data from an enterprise application. Each staff member performs their tasks in their own way.

When you hire new people, you have to spend a lot of time training them. If you could automate more tasks, you could save your staff members time, and you could standardize how tasks are performed.

SOLUTION:

After sitting with your staff members and having them walk me through their workflows, I will design an application that leads them through the steps of each task, automating as many steps as possible.

When a staff member receives a request for pricing, they will enter it into the app, and the app will

• Identify managers who need to approve the request

• Display a notification on managers’ dashboards when they open the application

• Turn out crisp, clean sales reports from it, distributing them automatically via email

PROBLEM:

You have data—hey, we all do. Right now, you have a lot of rows and columns that need to find their way from their existing location to a new one. You are not sure what technology, if any, exists to do this or what steps need to take place for your data to find its way safely to its new home.

SOLUTION:

Wolfskill Consulting will review the data with you, map where the source data goes and what transformations it must undergo to get there. We have performed elaborate, gnarly data migrations. 

Sometimes the architecture of the data’s current home is shaped like a pine tree and the architecture of the new home is shaped like a saguaro cactus. It happens. We can do it.