A description language instead of a thousand hand-built windows

The challenge

A real-time supervision and control system for a government client required hundreds of operator windows, under a contract carrying heavy penalty clauses. The first complex window had taken six months to hand-write; no second specialist in the required toolkit could be recruited; and adding manpower would not have solved it — the skill simply wasn’t available at that scale.

What we did

The honest assessment was that the plan, as posed, could not reach the objective — and we said so, proposing alternatives. When those were rejected, we let the contract end. We were then re-engaged on our own proposal.

Instead of writing the second window, we designed and built a description language and generator. The client’s own engineers could now describe a window declaratively and have the tool produce it — without specialist toolkit expertise, and many times faster.

The result

• The client’s own team produced the windows they needed, at a fraction of the per-window cost.
• The project completed on time.
• Penalty clauses running to tens of millions of dollars were avoided.

The leverage wasn’t in building the windows faster — it was in changing what had to be built by hand at all. Where’s the leverage in yours?