I was the primary architect and project manager and together with my colleagues we designed, built and rolled-out a fairly complex system which included ArcGIS, ArcIMS integration as well as generic integration with web-sites and data services, spatialisation of flat databases to ArcSDE, application and systems management and structured specific business processes. The total build to client acceptance took us 6 months!We were all 24-28 year olds at the time and we adopted the traditional programmer's approach of little sleep until we had finished the final build... We really did work bloody hard back then!
Even today some of the concepts and ideas that we developed are yet to be realised in standard commercial, enterprise GIS software systems and environments - and I truly believe that we had ground-breaking ideas. To this day (almost 7 years on) I am still proud of the technical abilities / dedication / determination and sheer hard work of the team and what we achieved and I would like to thank the main guys involved.
This link demonstrates what we built: https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=sites&srcid=ZGVmYXVsdGRvbWFpbnxhcGFyc2VjYXdheXxneDoxNDNlODMyYTgzOTE4ZGY1
We used agile / extreme project management techniques - we had 3 main technical members (full time) and up to 8 other technical members. Our main primary stakeholder group was 10 people and the total user base was 300 - 500 users extending later to a group of more than 1000.
Agile project management methods proved extremely effective in this particular instance because we had an unsure / indifferent stakeholder group and a very competent technical project team.
The system was extremely successful and has been in place with the client (with minor or no modification) for at least the past 6 years. Replacements to components of the framework (using recently developed core ESRI technolog) still leverage the core model - hence proving the extensibility/scalability of the original solution.
