Meet the team
Fusion Development is meant to empower both your development and business teams to create better software, faster. Your journey through Fusion Development begins with an introduction to our fictitious team members, who are discovering they need to improve their processes to lower the friction of doing business.
VanArsdel, Ltd. Heating and Air Conditioning, or VanArsdel for short, is a full service heating and air conditioning contractor. The core of VanArsdel's business involves sending field technicians to customers’ houses to install and repair all brands of heating and air conditioning equipment.
VanArsdel's business has grown exponentially over the past year. Along with that growth has come friction in scaling core business applications.
The software development team at VanArsdel is stretched thin and is working as fast as possible on a huge backlog. Meanwhile the business team relies on manual and paper-intensive work processes that do not scale, and this is causing undue stress and inefficiencies on the entire company.
You have been selected to work with some of VanArsdel's top employees as they brainstorm a way to develop software faster and empower the whole company in the process.
You will help them create a Fusion Development team.
Team members
Here are your team members:
Kiana is a full-stack developer and software architect specializing in C# and .NET. She has written and designed many of VanArsdel’s applications but is getting stretched thin by all the new requests. Kiana is familiar with Power Apps at a high level and is eager to learn how she can use her existing skills to empower Citizen Developers.
Malik is the office manager and is the heart of VanArsdel. He answers all customer inquiries, schedules appointments, and even helps technicians find answers when they need help. In other words, he’s overworked and needs to automate some of his repetitive tasks to provide even better customer service.
Maria works in inventory management and makes sure Van Arsdel runs like a well-oiled machine. She verifies the warehouse has enough parts and if not orders more using a legacy system that Kiana wrote. But more than that – she performs audits on the inventory, checks with vendors for the best prices, and other inventory supply management tasks.
Caleb is VanArsdel’s lead column technician. Caleb has tremendous knowledge and spends a lot of time mentoring junior technicians. His time is very valuable and VanArsdel wants to make sure he visits as many of their most valuable customers daily.
Preeti is responsible for making sure the IT systems are up and running. She worries a lot about security and applications accidentally leaving “backdoors” open. She also is stretched thin and needs to be sure any new apps are easy to govern and administer.
The kickoff meeting
The first agenda item of the Fusion Development kickoff meeting is to choose which business problem to address.
Caleb, VanArsdel's lead field technician, says he has a problem that's perfect for this team to solve.
It involves manual data entry with paper and pencil, phone calls, legacy software systems, and lots of lost time traveling between a customer's house and the central warehouse.
Maria, who oversees inventory management, smiles and says "I know what you're talking about Caleb, it's our Field Inventory Management System, isn't it?"
VanArsdel's lead developer, Kiana, shakes her head and apologizes "I feel bad, my team just doesn't have the time to modernize what's there or write the new portions for it."
"Sounds like a great place to start", Preeti observes, "but what is the Field Inventory Management System and how are we going to fix it?"
"I've been reading about this thing called Tech Intensity", Malik answers, "that I think helps explain how we'll work together. Once we understand that, then we can move on to solving the Field Inventory Management problem."
The team's attention turned to Malik as he walked toward the whiteboard.