Neighborhood Finance

A loan office needed an eligibility answer. I led the deployment and left staff able to change the map without us.

Neighborhood Finance Corporation answers one question all day: does this address qualify for a loan program in Des Moines or Cedar Rapids? I led four people. The map shipped. The part that makes it a deployment, and not a project we still operate, is that their staff edit the zones.

Problem

The customer could not adopt a GIS suite, and a map only an engineer can update stops saving money at the next boundary change. Two cities and more than one program was enough scope. A third tool they had to learn would have failed adoption.

Process

I sat with staff and wrote the jobs they would actually do after launch: search an address, read the zone, switch city, and later add or rename a shape. The site is static on purpose. Leaflet and GeoJSON, deployed by GitHub Actions. The maintenance doc is in the order a non-technical person gets stuck: add, rename, cut a hole, undo.

Solution

• One question in the tool: does this address qualify?
• Their files, not our database. Zones live where staff can change them.
• A written handoff. Adoption was in the definition of done.
• A four-person team, scoped to two cities.

Results

• $100K+ Saved for the customer each year
• 4 People on the deployment
• 2 Cities, one map
• After They change a zone without calling us

Justin Moran · Forward Deployed Engineer · Chicago, IL · LinkedIn · GitHub · Resume (PDF)