Sites & Apps: Standard & Poor's

Standard & Poor's — Ratings Process Manager

One of my assignments while working freelance at Standard & Poor’s was to develop a prototype for an application that would automate and organize the firm’s ratings process. Two key goals I took on was to a) mark up each page using semantic HTML, Web standards and robust CSS, and b) employ DOM scripting techniques to separate behavior from page structure.

The first screen of the analyst’s Deal Workspace simply lists the deals assigned to the analyst with critical dates and statuses. Functionality is provided to enable the analyst to view all deals within his/her team as well as search for deals.

Here’s what the markup looks like. And here’s the JavaScript.

Deal Summary Screen

The Deal Summary Information screen summarizes the critical data and documents required when rating an issue. In addition to displaying visual flags to indicate the status of the steps in the workflow, links are provided to the key data gathering screens and documents.

Work Party Screen

Drilling deeper into the workflow, the user is presented with screens that allow him/her to enter all required data to complete the credit rating. As shown in the following screenshots, I included various Ajax interactions to make the data entry process quick and efficient. Here the user can hover over a particular role to access edit and delete functionality.