CarePortal Case Study

Discovery

Global Orphan came to us with an existing Laravel app project that was over budget and massively behind schedule. Their app focused on connecting thousands of families, churches, agencies, and businesses to help provide for the needs of foster families and children across the country. Consisting of both a front-end and back-end, this multi-scale app included multiple roles across all the organizational types and thousands of accompanying lines of code to make the workflow seamless and intuitive.

The project was abandoned by a previous development company, and due to the nature of the application, it was a high priority for the client to find the right partner to help them develop and launch their app. Our team met with Global Orphan to plan out the project, initially spending a considerable amount of time on discovery to ensure that every workflow, data model, role, and action was accounted for. This was an absolutely necessary step for the success of the project since the scope and goal was massive. After discovery was complete, we met again to discuss our results and signed a formal work agreement to begin work on the application.

Buildout

Through comprehensive discovery, we planned the buildout and outlined every update that needed to be deployed. We organized all work according to role and data model, ensuring that specific models and roles that contained similar functionality would be tackled at the same time, thus cutting down on extra work down the road. Work was broken out by ticket and assigned in 2-week sprints, with client meetings occurring weekly to showcase progress and new functionality.

One of the biggest challenges we faced was working with an existing code base the previous development team had started. We had to step through functionality, cleaning up code and fixing errors as we also built out new features. The sheer number of roles, models, and paths that were available also posed a challenge. In order to overcome those challenges, we chose to create universal functions that could be reused by multiple roles based on the situation, thus cutting down on processing and response time. We also built out new functionality that could calculate a predetermined radius around a new request and alert specific churches, groups, businesses and individuals within that radius to the need, allowing them to communicate with each other to help meet the request.

Throughout the buildout process, our project managers QA’d features and functionality on the website as they were created and pushed to our development server. We regularly handed off sections of the site to the client for QA, ensuring that everyone had tested and signed off on the style changes prior to launch. Once features were verified, they were pushed to a second server in a live testing environment for an additional round of testing. We also created pipeline tests that ran prior to every code merge, ensuring that all new functionality wouldn’t affect existing workflows and procedures.

Launch

The new CarePortal app delivers a fully functional experience geared towards agency partners, organizations and individuals, allowing them to fully engage within their community to help meet the needs of families and foster children. Multiple roles have new functionality available to them, enabling them to quickly field requests and responses, ensuring that people in need get help in a quick and timely manner. Churches and individuals are more engaged and able to create a better community for everyone. CarePortals new app elevates their brand, positioning them as a unique and important player in communities across the country. Countless family's lives will be improved daily through their efforts.