An IT Consulting company platform intent on organizing customer technical assets, credentials and solutions into a web-accessible knowledgebase.

Most of the company's customers didn't care to know the details of technical services performed. They simply trusted the company to save them money and keep their business healthy.

To maintain integrity in this relationship, the company invested in several initiatives aimed at improving transparency and collaboration.

With help from in-house talent and an occasional contractor, I led these initiatives from ideas to operations through a highly iterative "eat your own dogfood" development and testing process informed by daily business needs.

The initiatives grew and integrated into a searchable, shared library of how-to solutions for transferring generalizable technical knowledge and training between consultants and clients. Both the company and customers experienced savings in recall, knowledge-transfer and onboarding.

The platform provided four basic services which continued to increase in value through integration: Time Entry, Issue Tracking, Asset Wiki and Asset Database.

Time Entry

This Python/PostgreSQL-based webapp raised the accuracy and recall of customer service visits by receiving SMS texts from Nokia phones and converting common shorthand codes into full text for tracking notes and times.

Its goal was to link the app with QuickBooks and the issue tracking service.

Issue Tracking

The issue tracking web service used Trac for creating a knowledgebase of solutions that could be shared among techs as problems arose.

Work like "Setup/Patch/Config Windows Server 2003" performed by one tech for one customer tracked procedures, references and issues. The documentation could then be found and refined by other techs performing a similar procedure elsewhere.

It improved the company's ability to respond in detail to customer invoice questions by partially integrating with the Asset Wiki.

Its goal was to allow customers to view research and technical documentation alongside invoices on work performed.

Asset Wiki

The wiki web service managed constantly changing information on customer goals and tech assets. It was valuable for quick access to everything from service tag numbers to hard drive replacement dates.

Some customer wikis provided single click access to device info from hyperlinks on AutoCAD visualizations of customer office floor plans and server rack elevations that documented device, user, and network drop locations.

Some wikis also included Visio-based network architecture diagrams.

The goal was to integrate with the asset database as a secure one-click web accessible front-end to information by customers and techs in the field.

Asset Database

The Microsoft Access database provided custom front-end forms and reports for managing on customer contacts, users, device assets, credentials and notes.

The goal was to move the back-end data to PostgreSQL and integrate more closely with QuickBooks for invoicing, marketing and service contracts.