Adding Seasonality to the Demand Data
Today my day started out with a rather early meeting for my work here at The Shop - 9:30 am, and it was about an interesting topic - the seasonal adjustment of the demand data we're using in our project. The problem is that the demand data is based on the previous 12-months historical sales data - all annualized. This means that boat tours should sell as well in July as December. Nope. So how to do this?
I'd already suggested in an email that we make a simple web app that allows the right people to add the important location and taxonomy data as well as a simple 12-month segmented graph (or even sliders or dials) so that the users could control the seasonality for their division and their sales reps. It makes sense - boats trips in Arizona are not down in December, so we need to really look at all the factors that might contribute to the seasonality of the demand.
Then we need to overlay this on the incoming demand and we're in business.
There's also the need for a manual demand entry screen where the users can input demand that they anticipate, and let them run with that. All sounds pretty decent. Very do-able.
But the proposal was that we base it on some Google Doc and parse out the data from a spreadsheet.
That's a horrible idea. I've had to do it so many times, and it always becomes a nightmare. The project manager thought it would be "easy" and "fast"… but all it really does is move the development effort from building the UI and data integrity checks to the data parsing and processing. There's no savings here. But Holy Cow! That was a 30 min meeting that took 90 min because this guy could not get the idea out of his head that this wasn't the way to do it.
I consider myself a decent communicator, but I've come to a loss with this guy. I think he's just not a good listener, but who knows. In any case, at the end of the 90 min meeting I was able to get some support from another developer manager and I think we're going to do the "Right Thing". But it was not easy.
Now I think I'm going to have to come up to speed on Rails, as I think we're going to build this in Rails, but at least it's going to be done Right.