2017 at Fiat Insight

A year of removing clutter and refocusing on what’s important

As another year comes to a close it’s good to take stock of the journey. It’s been an exciting and enjoyable year at Fiat Insight, not without its surprises. Here are a few of the highlights:

• We replaced our original customer and project management system with a new, hand-built one. The new one — built with Ruby on Rails, and using some slick Javascript —has a more “single page” feel and greatly improves the client user experience for requesting help and interacting with our team.
• We built a new dashboard welcome screen for individual websites that greets each client user upon login. The dashboard provides direct access for clients to submit a help request (via our new ticketing system) or view the status of existing requests.
• We created our first native Mac app using Electron. Sorry, but you won’t see it anytime soon because it’s the time tracker we use internally! Despite the lack of publicity, we’re proud of it because it made a daily task better.
• We partnered with some amazing organizations and launched over 35 applications and websites. You can see a few of those here.
• We grew! By adding a new team member we ensured that we can continue to provide timely and effective support in our client relationships.
• We started blogging on Medium. Publishing updates, how-to’s, and articles has been a rewarding exercise, as we make information accessible that was previously only internal. We hope you find it rewarding, too!
• We recently rebuilt and relaunched our own website. It’s simpler, faster, and easier for us to maintain, which should encourage us to treat it more like a living document in 2018.
• Speaking of documents, we documented — everything. Weary of forgotten Google Docs, we moved our internal documentation efforts to GitHub repos. By leveraging the conventions of Markdown we were freed from the ever-present layout tweaking in Google Docs. The result is a centralized library of company policies, workflows, processes, and guidelines that can’t be overlooked because we see them daily.

Reflecting in our recent team discussions, we’ve agreed that the experiences and work of this year have made us better: better able to serve our clients with less clutter, and with renewed focus on our mission. Here’s to an even better 2018!

Ready to act on your New Year’s resolution? Let us help you build a solution that’s just right: https://fiatinsight.com/contact