Resource planning for 7,500 users worldwide
- Client: anonymised
- Built in: 2018 · still running
The situation
An international technology company plans its projects on two measures: euros and person-hours. Both have to be correct per project, per department and per period, and both are entered by people spread across the whole organisation.
That's exactly the kind of process for which a spreadsheet feels ideal — right up until more than a handful of people work in it. After that come the locked files, the changes that can't be merged, and the copies that start living side by side.
At this organisation, something else made the problem fundamentally different: the users are spread across the world, in different time zones. There's no moment when it's quiet. No evening when someone can tidy up the file, no weekend when a change can go through unnoticed. What's a quiet hour in the Netherlands is the busiest part of the day somewhere else.
What we built
A resource management system in which around seven thousand five hundred users worldwide work. The users work in Excel, on their own computer — but the Excel file is a read-only template that stores nothing. All data lives in a central database. As a result, two people can never change the same data at the same time: if you want to change something a colleague is already working on, you see straight away who that is. No error message afterwards, but clarity beforehand. Anyone who only needs to read can view the data while a colleague is editing it.
Because there's no quiet moment, maintenance has been a design question from the start, not an afterthought: changes have to be deployable while, somewhere in the world, people are simply carrying on working.
How it fits together
Users work in Excel, but the file stores nothing: it is the shell. The data lives in one central database, which allows one edit per record at a time.
The result
The system was delivered in 2018 and is still running today, on the same database.
That's perhaps the most telling figure in this case. An application still running after eight years without a rebuild isn't a coincidence — it's the result of a tight design, recorded documentation, and a clear separation between user, administrator and developer.
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