This blog post is Human-Centered Content: Written by humans for humans.

As we end the year by wrapping up projects, getting ready for the holidays and looking toward the future, we here at InterWorks wanted to take a quick step back and review some of the projects that stuck out to us over 2024. Be they big projects or small, internal or external, easy or hard, we had plenty of cases that we can confidently call our favorite projects of the year.

To start the series off, I sat down with Analytics Consultant Chris Chang to hear about his favorite project of the year — and found that, to him, one of the most difficult projects he had this year turned out to be one of his favorites. For the purpose of this blog, and for this series as a whole, we’ll keep the client anonymous, but share as many details as we reasonably can. This is a synthesis of an interview I did with Chris, so I’ll feature his quotes throughout.

So, What Was the Project?

First off, let’s set the scene of who the client is, according to Chris:

They do infrastructure analysis in the United States and damage reporting on said infrastructure. They’re actually a nonprofit, so not my usual type of client. I normally get staffed on financial clients. I’ve also been in health care a lot. So, nonprofits: kind of different, kind of fun. I think they brought the nonprofit energy and are also a good cause.

And was the project he was brought on for?

So, they release an annual report looking back on [underground infrastructure] damages that occurred throughout the year, specifically looking at geographical locations and the types of damages. So, was it an excavator? Was it an auger, a hoe? Just the type of damage associated, as well as other thing, like what stakeholder group the infrastructure belonged to, because you’ve got different utility companies doing different infrastructure work. And so they released that report. Along with that report, they usually release snippets of their data, and the data comes in the form of a dashboard. It used to be in Power BI, but we recently sold them Tableau licenses, so they have migrated their public facing dashboards to Tableau.

And what they actually brought us on to do to support this particular project was their private facing dashboard. So, if you’re a member of this nonprofit group, then they wanted to give you access to your own data and data of companies who have allowed you to see their data. So, essentially, a privatized membership dashboard that gets way more granular, and you can see way more specific data on the data or way more specific data than just generally what happened in the whole U.S.

And, of course comes the question about why a report on damages to underground infrastructure was his favorite project of the year:

I think my favorite projects are normally the ones where everyone feels like we’re on the same team. I think it’s very easy to be working with a client and they already know what the outcome is. You know, we’ve got the paperwork saying we are going to deliver x, y and z. It’s very fleshed out, rigid and outlined.

And sometimes those projects can fall into the category of “they just want you there to get the work done.”

But with this client, it was more fun because it was truly like a partnership environment. So, even though we were trying to get the dashboards done, they sought out my opinion things out of scope as well. Oftentimes, it’s a good balance of whether or not something’s scope creep; but with this project, if they’re, say, looking at their database or looking at a different type of analytics that they’re trying to do, they would actually ask for my thoughts and opinions. They’d come open-minded, saying, “I know this is out of scope. We’re not asking you to do this, but we’re curious what your thoughts are on this approach.”

And I’m always happy to be a team player and be in those environments where everyone is a team and where everyone’s opinion is respected regardless of, you know, if you’re the consultant, if you’re a web dev looking at a database, if you’re the data guy looking at the design — doesn’t matter. Everybody whom I interacted with valued everyone’s opinions, and I think it really made the project just more enjoyable because a lot of the times, great ideas come from unexpected people.

And so being in that environment with them was quite fun.

So, it should be clear that Chris loved this particular client and, as we’ll elaborate on later on in the post, they loved him too. This particular project, however, was far from smooth sailing in a number of ways.

Anything That Can Go Wrong, Will Go Wrong

This project actually started out with a heart-stopping moment:

It started out with wrong licenses. Through a miscommunication, the wrong licenses were sold to [the client], and that looked like a several-hundred-thousand-dollar mistake.

Was not a great picture for a moment, but it ended up turning out fine during a follow-up call. Just a quick, “We need to look into this aspect of the project to make sure it’s still possible with those licenses.”

For the privacy of the client, we won’t go into too many of the specifics of the license sold vs. the work that was needed, but this ended up being a boon to the client in the long run:

Thankfully, what we were brought on for was still possible, but we really had to redirect what our workshop was focused on because I was going in getting ready to go through the old execution plan. To make sure that they still had value out of this project in the case that we were wrong and that we couldn’t do it, I actually took it a step higher and we started talking about their whole analytics process — so, how their data lands in their database, why they have certain setups, why they have a replica database, why they are doing certain things the way they’re doing them.

We also talked about the scope of everyone’s work. So, what the web dev would need to do in order to accomplish this, what their database people would need to do in order to accomplish this. And then we also just talked about cohesive design.

Because the public facing dashboards weren’t going to be affected by this one piece of the project.

It was truly actually only the work that we would’ve signed on to do — the private facing dashboards. So, there are a couple other vendors doing other project work in background, but only ours were gonna be impacted by these licenses, which was good news, because everybody else could proceed, and that gave kind of a platform for InterWorks to kind of be positioned as a partner in all their analytics; because in the five hour workshop we did, instead of just focusing on what InterWorks was going to do, we focused on what everybody else could do and what InterWorks could do as well.

And so what ended up happening is we actually ended up signing a brand new SOW a couple weeks back because the vendor that was in charge of building the public facing dashboard was not doing work that the client was pleased with. And not gonna lie, it was not really up to best practices.

The [client] team really liked the work that I produced, and they were like, yeah. Like, this is definitely out of scope — not sure if there’s time left, including what you need to finish right now — but could you just redo and redesign the public-facing dashboards? And, obviously, I said yes.

So, even with a dicey start, which is wont to happen with many a consulting project from time to time, things worked out for the best, both for Chris and for the client:

I knew they were pressed for time, so I was like: Look guys, If you can sign this SOW for thirty two hours, I will revamp everything as fast as I possibly can to make the new deadlines. That way, you’re not late, and they’re like, “Done.”

Then I was back to work. I just completely pivoted from what I was working on. They said, “Don’t worry about your original deadline. Let’s just get this out because we need to get it out.” So, we also ended up just doing their public facing dashboard, and they loved it.

Making It Work

With a fantastic client, even the most complex of jobs is much, much easier. And what’s listed here is only part of the hurdles Chris had to cross with this project. When asked what he would say directly to the client, this is what he said:

I would just say that this org has done a great job of putting together people who care, and I think it really shows, especially on our team calls and on our work calls. There’s great energy. There’s a lot of thoughtfulness, and they’ve just really created a wonderful environment to work in.

Thanks to Chris for talking about this project, and keep an eye out for more installments of “My Favorite Project This Year” in the weeks to come.