When I present, I start my presentations with a brief bio of myself and one item on there I generally have is a comment that I like to solve problems. This may sound obvious, but it’s true and I think describes my goal well. Yesterday, while on a 3 hour zoom call with a client, we got talking about various projects and it made me think about some of the problems I’ve solved over the years.

There are several I could talk about, but one came up yesterday. Several years ago at a previous client, the head of their call center came to me with an issue. They had a process where they’d export their call center logs and input them into SQL Server. Except to call it a process was a bit of an overstatement. It was a series of about 4-5 steps, all except the initial export were done manually. This meant that every morning one of their IT people would take a file from a Linux server, copy it locally, and then import it into Access where several macros were run on it to transform it and then the person would import it into the SQL Server where they could then run reports. There were several possible areas for mistakes to happen and while mistakes weren’t routine, they tended to happen about once or twice a month. On a good day, it would take about 1/2 an hour to do the manual import, on a bad day, over an hour. So in a month, one of their IT people could easily spend 15 or more hours on it, or over 180 hours a year.

In addition, adding new meta-data into the process was error-prone and he couldn’t do as often as he liked. He asked if I could take a look at it and automate it. While SSIS is not an area of expertise, I was familiar enough with it to know it was a good fit and said I’d work on a solution. It took some effort, but eventually I had a solution in place. The entire process now runs automatically in about 5 minutes and he can add or remove the meta-data he needs to by updating a single SQL table. He was quite pleased.

I’m also proud to say the only real time there’s been an issue with the process is when they had to for business reasons IP their entire internal network. They unfortunately scheduled this for a week when I was not only on vacation, but spending that week at some National Parks and Forests in the South Dakota area. The remoteness of these locations meant that my connectivity was very limited. I let their IP team know what changes had to be made to a config file to make things work, but in the aftermath of other issues they had to deal with this was missed. Fortunately, once I found the right place to sit in the National Forest we were camped in and get enough of a cell signal to log into their network, I was able to make the update and fix things. Since then, things have worked without a hitch.

I like this particular project, not just because it’s been so problem free, but because I think I can clearly point to a problem a client had and that I helped solve. Now that IT person can spend their time on more important issues.

It also is an example of a mantra I think is generally true:

Anything that can be automated should be automated.

There’s other projects I may write about at other times (including a few involving PowerShell) but that’s it for today.

What projects are YOU proud of? I’d love to hear from you.