November 07, 2004
Accenture Challenge in the Rearview Mirror
One of the high points of my adventure in CICS was last year's Accenture Challenge. I wanted very much to see our team win the Challenge. We had a great group and we really worked well together. One of the our team is Matt Smith who is finishing up this semester. We met a number of evenings at my house for our many 601 projects, and by the time the Challenge rolled around we were a pretty scary bunch. Even so, how we got as much good work done on the Challenge is still a bit of a marvel in my mind. We won last year despite having to go up against tough competitors. It was my biggest thrill as a CICS student (even though I know we dozed off during the Accenture presentation of their own real-world solution to the Challenge problem).
Justin Coble has reminded me that the Challenge must be soon and I have learned that our package from last year is in very limited circulation around the Center. In the interest of giving everyone a point of reference, I am uploading our winning package from last year. We tweaked this thing until the last minute, so it might not be the exact document we handed to Ray, but it is close. I like to think we did pretty well, and I hope it will help this year's groups to go to the next level.
Go for it! I hope I will get to see the finals.