Company Consulting Debrief for Swagger Distribution

For this assignment, I needed to review the various computer programs and tools used by Swagger Distribution's employees and identify areas of improvement that could benefit the employees' productivity. These recommendations covered various back office applications such as Word and Visio as well as review and recommendations of their information database.

In reviewing the office productivity applications, I recommended additional usage of word documents for note-taking by improving the "Draw" functionality of Microsoft Word with the use of a stylus to facilitate ease of note taking, handwriting recognition, and drawing various shapes to be included within a word document.

For Visio, I reviewed the needs of the organization and created a detailed user guide identifying the specific menus and controls that need to be used to easily accomplish what needs to be done based on the description of the issues they were facing when creating drawings and documents.

My third assignment was to review their application and identify any code changes to modify the behavior of the application to fit the requirements as defined. I reviewed the code, identified the source of the issue as reported, made the code changes, and wrote up a detailed explanation of what I had discovered and how I had remedied the issue.

My last assignment was to create a document explaining network topology and all the elements that allow a computer or a smart device to connect to other devices within the company as well as outside of the company. I utilized a visual drawing of a typical network, identified all the various elements, and explained each element in non-technical terms.

I completed this assignment in February 2019.  It is a very good example of a typical consulting assignment that crosses issues of user productivity as it pertains to their interaction with typical back office productivity tools as well as reviewing and improving the functionality of the business application used to manage the organization's processes.  

In order to understand and discover how to improve user productivity utilizing off-the-shelf applications, one needs to understand and analyze how the application is being used by the users and utilize one's familiarity with user interface principles to be able to recommend more efficient ways to accomplish the typical tasks performed by those users or find and explain functionality that they may not have been familiar with.  Once the analysis is completed, the results have to be explained clearly and concisely in non-technical terms so that it would be easily understood by users who may not be technically oriented.  

For the business application debugging and improvement aspect of the assignment, I needed to use my programming skills to identify the source of the issue and find an appropriate solution to fix the problem.  In addition to using my programming skills, I had to be able to explain what had been analyzed, what was discovered, and how I went about applying the remedy in non-technical terms to be easily understood by the business leadership with the organization.

This assignment allowed me to demonstrate my analytical skills, my technical capabilities, and my communication skills to help the organization identify more efficient ways to perform their tasks.