Ok well today was DM05 and our first delivery..
We arrived at Dermot’s at 14:00 and ran through a demo of the software on our laptop..
Demo goes well…Dermot impressed..
David starts installing the system on Dermot’s server..
While this is happening Dermot starts asking about filters. I run through the demo again displaying the filters we have implemented (without his input because he never got back to us).. Finally we get somewhere Dermot gives a list of all ther filters he needs.. if you’ve been following the blog you will have noticed several unanswered emails (not to mention meetings) where we have asked for this material.. We now have a list:
He wants to filter\search for clients by(in addition to the existing filters):
1. Address
2. Occupation
3. Policy Type
4. Tax status
5. phone client id (our primary key)
6. policy number
7. insurer id
8. employer
While its a pretty extensive list at least we now have it and can get working on implementing it.. Our primary key for a client will be matched to a hard copy of the clients file.
This also threw up another problem… In our client table we have a number of re-occurring customers – we considered this to be just bad\noisy data(as the data is pretty irregular in terms of uniformity) .
However, during the course of Dermot hallway testing the software he was able to tell us that this is because each client in that table is a separate policy – this means one client can have several policies.
The next piece of data was the customer creation test – here Dermot was able to tell us that our import form did not have enough information to create a new client – again from the blogs you can see we have been asking for this formally since early December.
He has now said he will send us an excel sheet with the data required for creating a new customer. I’ll be calling him from Monday onwards until we get it.
On the quotation front things are looking brighter. I was speaking with Sean at Best Advice (a company which provides services to brokers) and they can provide us with xml quotation data based on our posted material to generate client quotations. – He is sending on some documentation on Monday.
We then had a number of issues with the deployment of the services which took quite a while to get sorted.
We left Dermot’s at around 16:45 and were pretty wrecked by the whole ordeal.
Though in reflection i do feel it was a day where i hope Dermot finally realised he needs to take a more active role in the project and that we can’t read his mind as to what he wants. It’s just a pity it’s taken this long for it to happen.
On the bright side he still appears very positive about the whole project & although he will continue using his access database for now its a big step to making the change over to make it redundant.
What it means for us are some issues..
When were supposed to moving onto other aspects of the project were still stuck on this one.
From tomorrow we’re going to have to take a deep dive into his 7 table database and try and piece together the rather ugly looking puzzle.
I believe today was a setback in terms of being able to meet our criteria set out in the functional spec in time but it is a big step forward for the project in terms of ability to satisfy the users end goals.
I think we are looking at about 8-10 working days to get deliver the issues arising from today.
The glass is half full.
