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That's a super dismissive point of view. Here's another: Working with a government office with zero technical expertise they setup elastic search and converted
by bglazer 11y ago
That's a super dismissive point of view.
Here's another: Working with a government office with zero technical expertise they setup elastic search and converted hundreds of pages of Word documents into a searchable, well designed form and saved government workers hundreds of man-hours of fruitless searching. This process, in and of itself, was useful to show the agency how technical change can be executed quickly and successfully.
- djcapelis 11y agoYou're correct. That is a much more buzzwordy way to say they combined a bunch of PDFs in two days. The real point both of you are touching on is the surprising part of this story has nothing to do with the technology. It's perfectly reasonable to have accomplished a prototype like this in two days. The big thing here is in how they overcame the entirely non-technical obstacles to do it. I think there's probably two main things they did right: * They selected an achievable project with immediate high impact on the organization's day to day work. * They had the reputation, credibility and positioning required to make sure that their project didn't get bogged down by procedure or requirements imposed by external forces. As it turns out, these two things are some of the most important ingredients for affecting change with software and are relevant to nearly all teams. Many teams only get one of the two. Sometimes you get none.