Decoding the Consultant Life: Real stories from real consultants – Juhani & Smartvatten
When potential customers ponder whether they should use our services, they usually like to see some reference cases. Why wouldn’t our potential employees think the same?
This post is part of the Decoding the Consultant Life: Real Stories from Real Consultants series, where we share our consultants’ projects. This time, we hear thoughts from our Data Engineer, Juhani Takkunen.
Our team helped Smartvatten solve a problem where reporting processes were distributed across different spreadsheets and financial and operational metrics required significant manual effort.
Juhani shares his insights on the project:
Our team built a common data platform for Smartvatten. Because we’ve solved similar challenges for companies needing to serve data across multiple teams, we were able to jump right in. Using our internal templates, we quickly spun up a proof of concept. This really helped improve communication early on between all participants, especially since the BI system was being developed at the same time by a third-party vendor.
Navigating Complex Business Logic
The vast majority of our time was dedicated to defining, modeling, and implementing KPI calculations. Defining the business rules was complex and required a lot of back-and-forth between multiple key stakeholders. Although this wasn’t a surprise, it became a challenge for our project timeline, budget, and scope.
On the other hand, cleaning the data and properly defining KPIs allowed the customer to create live analytical reports. Earlier the customer wasn’t able to do this or keep the reports updated daily. Personally, I really enjoyed this part of the work: working closely with the customer to understand and define the business problem and experimenting with different solutions to find the one that truly solved the root issue.
Key Takeaways on Project Management
For me, the biggest learning experience was to see how this project was managed. Every project is different, and this one especially had a nice balance between Codento and Smartvatten project managers. It was especially helpful when the project moved between different phases and there were staff changes.
Meet Our Expert, Juhani Takkunen:
Juhani is a software developer and data engineer with over 10 years of experience in designing and building integrations for financial management and payroll applications. Throughout his career, he has also gained experience as a team leader and has a strong background in automation, scripting, and cloud services.