Terri Schlak

Selected work / 03

The request is rarely the whole problem.

A few examples of looking past the ticket, brief, or symptom.

Deployment in progress

They asked for a website. They needed a better way to run the business.

A small outdoor-services company had enough appointments that scheduling by text message no longer scaled. The website became a lightweight business application.

The visible request

“We need a website.”

The operational problem

Requests, availability, assignments, and customer updates lived in a chain of texts.
Customer requestConfigurable availabilityEmployee acceptsCustomer confirmed

The solution

Requests, availability, assignments, confirmations, customers, properties, pricing, and history—in one system.

My role

Discovery, requirements, data relationships, AI-assisted implementation review, testing, and deployment.

Foundation

A SQL Server data model with Cloudflare deployment currently in progress.

  • Process design
  • SQL Server
  • Web application
  • Email automation
  • AI-assisted development

Rethink / ITA Group

Rethinking a week-long data process.

I mapped the jobs, questioned unused outputs, and found avoidable reruns.

Projected to reduce processing time by more than 50%. Recommended and documented; not implemented before I left.

Map → question → reorder → project

Investigate / ITA Group

Finding a hidden sales-processing defect.

A QC discrepancy contradicted the business rules. I reproduced it in test, then helped confirm a year-handling defect.

QC → rule → reproduce → root cause

In progress / volunteer work

Clean the data first. Then automate.

A phased Salesforce plan for Ronald McDonald House of Central Iowa: understand operations, clean duplicates, stabilize the foundation, then automate. Future phases are planned—not yet implemented.

Shadow Identify Clean Stabilize Automate later