Lena noticed that some of the archived project reports were still using classical Roman numerals for their versioning, making it hard to sort them by date. She decided to build a quick utility to translate these strings into regular numbers so the dashboard could display them properly. When she showed her progress to Mark, he reminded her to watch out for the tricky cases where a smaller symbol appears before a larger one, like how 'IV' needs to be treated as four rather than six. To test it out, they verified that a complex string like 'MCMXCIV' correctly mapped back to the year 1994.