Under Pressure

Par for the course really. How often do you get told the deadline is tight and cannot be shifted as the media slot has been booked?

When I was told I had 2 weeks to develop the Careers24.com Salary Survey Results Dashboard I thought to myself, “no problem”. The stats guy had 4 weeks to do his thing and I needed to supply him with my data requirements.

Salary Survey 2008

The client contact person came from a project management background and as such she nearly exploded when the data guy came with one excuse after the other for being late. First the data quality was bad because they added the dreaded “Other” field to the survey. This caused most participants to just type in their jobs instead of looking for them on the list. So he had to manually go through 20,000+ records to fix this.
That wasn’t the end of it, his second excuse for not being on time was that his computer was hit by lightning. This meant that while I could do the foundation work on the dashboard I couldn’t integrate the data. We were not sure if he could deliver the aggregated data in the format I required.

So instead of having 2 weeks to develop the dashboard I had 1. Just 1 week to design, populate and test. There was no turning back, I had to deliver and deliver I did.
Squeezing 2 weeks into 1, working round the clock. I had to use Skype and email to communicate. PowerPoint slides with screenshots and annotations were sent back and forth, long hours on the phone and then, right as the client was about to crack I pulled through. The dashboard was finished.

I delivered in 1 week what the previous year’s flash developer took 3 months to do. The client didn’t believe me at the start that Xcelsius could deliver on my promises but it did. I had saved the day and the launch party was a blast.

Using Xcelsius 2008 I could deliver all but one of their requests, I could not display values above the bars of the charts. Now as of SP3 I can

If you think you can’t, you usually can.
Time can slow down given enough Redbull.
Being a report developer can be quite exciting.
Pressure can turn a lump of coal into a diamond.

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