My First Baby

Enabler was my first commercial application, so holds a certain place in my heart. I was approached by the lecturer during a talk on assertion techniques (which I was failing miserably at - I'm not too good at putting myself forward) who said he had a paper based 360° performance appraisal system and that he was struggling to sell it.

The main problem was that it involved sending out dozens of paper forms getting people to fill them in and then adding up the scores. This was a massive commitment of time and effort, at the end of which he had to formulate a report. Quick just didn't apply to this system. It was also somewhat expensive, as the paper questionnaires had to be on special paper to stop them being photocopied and used over and over again.

Based on his forms I produced a prototype system using VB3 for the review coordinator and C++ Builder for the stand alone remote questionnaire program. He was happy with the results and I had the first commercial package under my belt.

His only criticism was that the whole package fitted on a single floppy disk, so didn't "look" value for money. While I didn't entirely agree with this attitude, I reluctantly converted the code to VB4-16 which pushed it on to two floppy disks because of the runtime requirements. This was, in hindsight, a major mistake as VB4-16 was somewhat less than stable.

What we ended up with was a system that allowed him to create a "review" and to define a series of people to take part in that review. There was the person to be reviewed, their manager(s), peers and subordinates. Once the list of participants were defined, the system emailed questionnaires to the participants and received the completed questionnaires back.

Once all questionnaires had been received, the software analysed the results and produced a comprehensive report showing how the reviewee rated themselves against their managers, peers and subordinates, grouped by competency. There was then an in depth report showing

where there was the largest gap between their self assessment and that of their managers
where they had under assess themselves and
where they had over assess themselves.

Using this information, we produced an action plan for the assessee and their manager. The final report was rather impressive, if I say so myself.

We parted company at this stage as he had his software and he now needed to go sell it.

Several years later, he came back to me to say that he had sold a couple of copies, but that he was struggling. He had had several other people dabble with the code but needed some changes and I was the only person he was comfortable with.

I changed the code, as requested and made a small amount of money; nothing like what I should have for the amount of work I did. The relationship was a little strained because of this. However, the changes all helped enhance the product and that's the main thing.

We've since parted again and are no longer in touch. The software generated some revenue, but nowhere near as much as it should have. It did, however, make some interesting contacts for my client.