Designing an Application Rationalization Service Platform

Customer Snapshot

• International company with offices in three countries and a primarily distributed, home-based staff
• Technology industry company specializing in providing enterprise B2B solutions

Key Differentiators

• Leverages free and low-cost plugins, a commercial theme, and a child theme
• One junior and one senior WordPress resource used at three-quarters time for development

Solution Snapshot

• New WordPress web application development project
• The solution is hosted on managed WordPress cloud hosting
• Some custom code development required

Skills Needed:

• Gravity Forms Environment
• HTML/CSS
• Membership
• PHP
• WordPress
• Workflow

Key features include:

• Monitor progress and impact with dashboards and analytics
• Identify and sequence activities and deliverables
• Unlimited tasks
• Interactive calendar
• In-project discussion
• Progress bar on the list
• Comments, description & title
• Mark to-do as complete/incomplete
• Start & end date of the project
• Assign messages and task list on milestones
• Link messages & task lists with files
• Link to documents
• Make files private
• Upload files on messages & comments
• User permissions
• Team category permissions
• Reporting
• Real-time updates
• Sub Tasks
• Kanban Board
• Gantt Chart
• Recurring Tasks
• Activity log
• Milestone Tracking
• Mobile-friendly

Survey data collection

• Web-based forms with multi-page navigation support
• In survey question scoring
• Capture inputs consistently and with increased objectivity
• Editable entries
• Data table display of entries
• Search, sort, and filter by data table view fields
• Entry detail display

The Challenge

The client wanted to develop a software platform to manage the application rationalization process for their clients. The goal was to create a single secure portal to control all of the activities and reporting for both company and client users during an engagement. Project success was dependent on being able to support easy, secure user access, task completion, and reporting in a responsive, mobile-friendly platform.

Early key requirements included having the ability to conduct application surveys, assign surveys and other tasks to clients and staff, provide a custom dashboard for each user where they can see their assignments and the associated status, deliver results in an easy to understand visual way online and yet support detail depth, show current project status and stages, enable discussions about tasks, send real-time updates automatically or manually, support sub and sequential tasks, support a TIME (Tolerate, Invest, Migrate, Eliminate) recommendation for each application, and log all system activities.

The solution also needed to be developed to meet a short deadline in order for the company to take advantage of an upcoming client opportunity. Since the deadline was so tight and the service offering was new to the company, it was determined that using a traditional custom development methodology was not cost or time-effective, even with an offshore development team, at this time. They were also looking to test out their service process and refine requirements before committing to a larger development effort.

QAT Global suggested developing the solution WordPress as a framework for the custom web application in order to get a fast start to the project. After an initial review of how the majority of their requirements could be achieved using WordPress Core and existing plugins, the client agreed on a WordPress development path.

The Solution

QAT Global helped the customer create high-level requirements, which required many group meetings to brainstorm functionality and processes. A development team consisting of a junior and a senior US WordPress developer was formed to execute the project. Weekly meetings were conducted where project status was reviewed. Regular demos were held during development to ensure the customer was getting exactly the solution they wanted, and adjustments were made based on these reviews. The requirements significantly evolved as previews and planning meetings occurred during development.

The project was completed in less than five months using part-time resources. The development time included the technical setup and design of the portal, creation of the security policy workflows, development of an extensive array of forms, and conceptualization of a variety of employee engagement mechanisms. Security issues were addressed by hosting the application at a managed hosting provider with SOC 2 Certification, and that ensures PCI Compliance in addition to using a security plugin and some custom coding.

The result was a responsive, mobile-friendly solution that delivers on the requirements using a user-friendly interface and streamlined workflows. Client staff users can log in to access the responsive, web-based portal to complete surveys and manage their interviews and workshops. Client project leads can access the portal to get project updates and view application reports. Project managers and client leads can see the status of all assigned tasks in the reporting module.

• Print data table or detail display page
• Charts and aggregate calculations