Autodesk Labs Software Engineer, David Falck, sent me this for the blog. Since the mass translation of old Project Draw users to the new system resulted in no loss of Project Draw data, I was happy to post it.
Wacker Drive in Chicago is my absolute favorite place to drive in the United States. Besides being a picturesque double-decker road, it snakes in every direction - much to the chagrin of many Chicago visitors. It is an essential artery in the middle of downtown. If you need to get somewhere quickly by car, you're best route probably involves going underground on Lower Wacker. Wacker Drive has been featured in a lot of movies - everything from the Blues Brothers to the recent Batman films (this handy guide from the team at Everyblock http://chicago.everyblock.com/the-dark-knight-film-locations/). While my Honda looks nothing like the Bat Mobile, I can't help but pretend. ;)
Wacker Drive underwent a huge reconstruction effort a few years ago. I spent many a lunch hour peering into the construction pits, wondering how it was going to all turn out. The reconstruction was considered one of the most complex downtown transportation projects, yet was completed on time and under budget. And then you never heard about it again. Such is the price of a successful engineering project. Contrast this with Boston's "Big Dig" which was admittedly a bigger and more ambitious project, but nonetheless made national news by being 5 years late and billions of dollars over-budget.
Why is it we hear so little about the successful engineering implementations? Take our consolidated login project we recently completed here at Autodesk. I had a very small role in this massive project, but I got to work with several key engineering and QA teams that worked tirelessly day and night for months to tie all of the disparate accounts across Autodesk into one seamless login system. The project was managed and implemented successfully - so much so, that most users saw little difference when they logged in after it went live. No fanfare, no ribbon cutting, just lots of happy users (with a fewer login accounts to manage), getting to where they want to go faster and more efficiently.
Our consolidated login project was very successful. We have received very few problem reports at [email protected] and [email protected]. We were able to manually correct the handful of "victims" of the mass processing. We are happy about that.
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