Flex - Flexi-Time Management

Council-wide application for flexi-time management, with over 2000 users and 20,000 submitted sheets within a year of launch, FLEX is an in-house application used council-wide to record working hours and leave. The application is a .net MVC web application written in C# using Entity Framework and Linq, connecting to a SQL database. The source code is under source control in a Team Foundation Server. The Live and UAT applications are hosted with IIS and have corresponding databases, there is also a third DEV database. Access to the site and database selection is handled in the projects web config. The database was designed and normalised at the beginning of the project, with parts like the Exception Reason added retroactively with the changing product requirements. (see below.) Users are set up automatically using the switchboard dataset when there is a match between SAP and AD. The SQL Server Integration package runs daily and also updates changes to existing records i.e. when someone changes their name or moves to a different team under a different line manager. There is also a delegate function that allows overriding the line manager update. Reports in the application use SQL Server Reporting Services to view stats such as the total users and more importantly to see where people have worked more hours, I have suggested to senior management that this could be used to see which teams are overextending and where more resources could be required. My favourite part of this project, aside from the environmental and usability improvements that come from a fully web-based system, is the trigger on the Month table that will cascade the carried forward values when a month is changed. This is to keep any future month records carried forward values in sync where a previous month flex has changed, Although this was a challenge to implement, it taught me just how powerful SQL can be and the result for the users is seamless. he most challenging part of this project, ‘the merged config’. When moving from one config to another where the total time worked in the month is altered, such as an employee moving from part-time to full-time required calculations that needed to be approved by HR and a group of other individuals. I envisioned a solution that would be user-friendly and convenient by creating a ‘merge config’, where the period before the new and old config would be a combination of the two, taking into account the working pattern of both and factoring in the total hours worked under each period using the ‘effective from date.’ Please note that the site is only accessible on the CBMDC network.

Business Continuity Planning

A business-critical application used council-wide for hazard management, mitigation and resource allocation. The application is a .net MVC web application written in C# using Entity Framework, connecting to a SQL database. The source code is under source control in a Team Foundation Server.\n\nThe Live and UAT applications are hosted with IIS and have corresponding databases, there is also a third DEV database. Access to the site and database selection is handled in the projects web config. The database was designed and normalised at the beginning of the project, with parts like the Exception Reason added retroactively with the changing product requirements. Here is the final database structure:\n\nReports in the application use SQL Server Reporting Services to view and print plans.\n\nMy favourite part of this project is the freedom I had so early within my career, four months into my time at the council I was the lead developer in charge of this business-critical application with little to no involvement from the rest of the team this meant I got to experience every stage of development, from the first engagement with the customer to deployment and support. I was extremely proud of my work on this project, especially when doing the handover to the team who would be supporting the application if I was unavailable. The most challenging part of this project was probably the pagination I decided to develop from scratch, although it took me a while to implement, completing this task helped to reinforce my understanding of MVC. Please note that the site is only accessible on the CBMDC network.