Best Week Ever

I had the best week. I was completely in the zone with Consultant Fu, even though I am now serving as Employee #14324 at giant corporation. The third-party consultant firm for the Infor EAM product came in to kick off the requirements analysis for our implementation, and we had a great week. I really enjoyed our business process consultant, and his technical lead both. It's important that consultants have good personalities if you are going to sit with them in meetings all week long. These folks did (and if you email me, I'll give you their names.)

I even came up with some great ideas myself, like combining two field values into a single selection (as it turned out, past data showed that they were always selected at the same time, not usually independent. If A, then B.) Also, we were able to reduce 6 pages of Category, Type & Item combinations (known in the Remedy world as CTIs) into 1 page of menu options. Redundancy reduced, simplicity increased. And to make it even easier for data entry, I came up with short codes to prefix each menu option so that related items sorted together!

It's important to recognize when you may have the skills, but not the knowledge. I knew we needed someone with the specific Infor product knowledge, and business process experience, who could tell us the best practices for an implementation. And that's exactly what got us back on track.

This week really gave me the opportunity to show my company why they hired me, although it took hiring external consultants to get this project going in the right direction. It was, after all, my idea to find specialized Infor consultants.