My Role
Lead Developer (Web and DVD), Audio/Video Producer
Tech + Tools
Javascript, HTML/CSS, PHP/MySQL, Flash, Photoshop, Documentary Style Video and Audio, Video Editors and Compression
Why I Loved This Project
Now THIS was a big project! The A.M. Kan Work! manual was a joint project between the Southwest Environmental Finance Center (SWEFC, then the NMEFC) and the Kansas Department of Health and Environment. This Asset Management manual started as a big physical binder – a comprehensive guide for water authorities nationwide to improve their asset management. All municipalities have waste water treatment facilities and manage public water supplies, and maintaining complex infrastructure is critical. This equipment is expensive, complex, and sometimes aging, and prior to this manual, many water authorities weren’t properly managing these assets, leading to millions of dollars of waste and the associated environmental impact.
One of the main functions of the SWEFC is to lead trainings that teach water authorities how to do better with asset management and financial resources, and the A.M. Kan Work! manual was an effort to bring their work to a national scale. It was decided that in addition to the book, the manual should be also be a fully interactive digital manual in both website and DVD format.
That’s where I came in. I had already built the SWEFC’s website, a hand coded site with a custom CMS and several other associated sites and I was their web host admin (LAMP system). The first thing we did was to travel to several water authorities nationwide and interview key personnel on camera. I was the audio side of the two person team that ran those documentary style shoots, which included interviews and b-roll.
Next, I was in charge of audio post while my partner did video editing, with the input of the team at the SWEFC. Next, it was my job to find a streaming format and compression algorithm to successfully embed these videos in the digital A.M. Kan Work! manual. At the time, streaming was relatively new, and this was not as straightforward a task as it would be now!
Next, I had to build out the entire manual in two entirely different formats. One was a web based format – which is is still live after all these years, here. I used no template, no existing framework. Instead I meticulously crafted the code using PHP, MySQL, and Javascript. Next, I redid the entire project from scratch using Flash, to include on a DVD version of the manual. Both these phases required a surprising amount of image manipulation and planning to match the vibe and brand look of the paper manual, which I did not design. But I love the art of translating to different media!
Next, the crowning jewel of the process. The team had come up with an extensive “Asset Management IQ” quiz which water authorities could use to gauge how well they were doing and where they could improve. A paper version of this quiz was used regularly in training seminars. I was asked to create an interactive version of this quiz that would keep a running tab of their answers and give them scores on each section, as well as a final score and summary that they could print or download to a PDF. This might be an easier task today, but at the time, it required coding from scratch. Again, I used PHP and MySQL with a heavy dose of JavaScript. The job was tricky and required strategic mix of persistent global variables as well as isolating locale variables for each section. After some deliberation, I went to bed one night with the project on my mind.
Overnight, instead of sleeping, I wrote the code in my head. Literally laid awake planning not only the skeleton and algorithm but literally writing and memorizing the code in my head. In the morning, I just started writing down what I’d come up with. In a couple of days, I had the first functioning draft of the quiz! Although the manual looks dated now when you visit it online, it’s a proud thing for me that the original code still functions flawlessly, even after years of changes to internet and browser technology. It’s built to be relatively timeless and I love that!
Outcomes
A.M. Kan Work! was a huge hit! Says the SWEFC Director, Heather Himmelberger:
We have used it as part of training for hundreds and hundreds of utilities. It advanced asset management practice across the entire country. It laid the foundation for a lot of advances across the country in asset management. There are many systems implementing asset management effectively as a result of this product. Anyone doing robust implementation of asset management will see a monetary benefit.
Said another contributor, “Thousands of water systems have been trained on it and many still use it.” And even though the SWEFC has been through several iterations of their website since my version, they’ve always kept the online A.M. Kan Work! manual and my Asset Management IQ quiz live. I love that!
What I’d Do Differently Now
These days I would probably be faster at this project, and the technology we have now would make it easier. That’s not a regret, just an acknowledgement of how far we’ve come. One thing I would do differently now regardless of the tech is use day time hours to do my planning phase for the coding that I spent all night writing in my head. That’s a fun story and it’s fun to look like a crazy genius but it’s not actually healthy and now, health is my main priority. No reason to lose sleep for a project when you can properly plan and work efficiently, sleep right, and come at the project fresh in the morning with a solid plan.
Also, we had one video mistake and it was my fault. For only one of the shoots, my partner couldn’t make it so I had to play videographer and audio person. I failed to check if the camera was in HD or SD mode (which at the time meant a different aspect ratio) and shot the whole interview in SD. We came up with a good work around but that was a lesson. Not so much in being thorough (because it’s always possible to forget something), but in keeping checklists written down so that you have a back up to your memory. You can’t necessarily expect to remember every step every time, and contingency plans are the real way flawless excellence happens.