One of the more rewarding tasks in recent history was to collaborate with our Head of Creative Services in order to see how we could dramatically improve our current workflow system. Achieving this would have a magnitude of benefits: enabling us to be more efficient with our resources, getting through our workload faster and most importantly, prioritising work in the most efficient manner possible.
After a few meetings, it was concluded that if we could update our date fields, this could potentially be a game changer – it could alter the way we do things forever. The issue we faced with our workflow system was that when a date wasn’t set by the user, the system would provide one to finish the order. I was challenged with the task of amending this so that the date fields could be manipulated as necessary and would be more suitable for our users’ journeys.
Changing the fields was no easy task – it involved digging deep into the workflow engine, a place where no man has gone before. This meant getting my hands dirty to understand a complex system and its behaviours. It felt like a grueling task and at times extremely frustrating.
Over a few days I had to write experimental code, have numerous debugging sessions, and tediously examine contents of the error logs. It soon felt like achieving this task would be impossible – I was annoyed and deflated.
Towards the end of one day, I had an idea. If I could get it to work for a particular case, the problem would be solved. I changed the code with my new idea, quickly set up my tests and ran them again. After several minutes of waiting impatiently, I found that it had worked!! I had a breakthrough!! I was overjoyed and jumped out my chair in glee!
This was immensely gratifying and it was incredible to see how this could turn into one of the biggest game changers for our workflow system.