One of the benefits of working with multiple customers is that the experience acquired in one organisation can be applied to help deliver future projects. So we will outline recent projects delivered by MadCowInternet below.
Offshore private finance in Jersey (March 2018 – March 2019)
- Digital transformation of paper-heavy processes
The primary directive was to apply digital transformation within the organisation. Business processes here are based around paper, lots of paper. And spreadsheets.
The transformation programme ripped up the rulebook and designed new methods that would streamline work processes and reduce reliance on paper. - Best practices – GitHub for version control
Early in the project the team identified a need for our code changes to be auditable. We introduced GitHub to the organisation and used this to maintain a repo for each solution we built. By using GitHub all code changes were tracked and we used code reviews as a quality checkpoint before deploying updates from the dev environment to beta or live. - Universal Tracker solution
This is an organisation that performs many regular activities for it’s clients. The accountancy team alone delivers hundreds of accounting “products” to clients each month and thousands on a quarterly basis. As the company grew the work required to track the delivery of these products became a problem, and at the start of the project was performed using a massive Excel sheet and lots of managers’ time.
Enter a transformation piece to spec and build a digital solution, and the Tracker project was started. Tracker has an MS SQL database at its core with the Firmstep platform as it’s user interface. Using Tracker it is possible for a manager to: define the tasks and activities necessary to deliver a product; set timescales for delivery; and then associate a product with a client and specify the teams responsible for each task. The solution will start a cycle of the product on the date necessary to hit the delivery deadline. Tracker provides workers with tasks to deliver the product and record the time spent on each activity. There are reporting views for managers to help them monitor delivery. - Client Take-on process
The client take-on is a paper heavy process. The redesign of this process aimed to remove all paper, allow appropriate staff to access the information as they needed it (rather than needing to retrieve the file) and added a digital approval processes.
The forms and processes were fairly light and the heavy-lifting performed in the MS SQL database.
Large county council (June 2017 – February 2018)
- Migrate Concessionary Travel processes from AchieveForms to new Firmstep Forms
One of the biggest challenges for this form was a JavaScript webcam integration which is used to take the customer’s photo and write the base64 file into the form and then pass it into the integration with the back-office system.
The processes also had numerous lookups and integrations with the SmartCitizen system (used by the back-office CT Team). - Migrate Home Fire Safety Check form with complex mapping from AchieveForms to new Firmstep Forms
This is an internal form that had quite complex bespoke JavaScript mapping in the old form. Our aim was to deliver the same functionality but using as much standard Firmstep Forms functionality as possible. The end result is a form that works better and has less custom JS. - Assist internal WCC team in migration of Adult Social Care processes from using CareFirst to Mosaic back-end system
The council was coming to the end of a project to migrate its social care teams from CareFirst (from OLM Group) to Mosaic (from Servelec-Corelogic) and needed an experienced consultant to help with the work of switching Contact Centre forms to integrate with the new back-end. MadCowInternet was able to relieve pressure on key internal developers by taking on the work of writing XSLT to transform web service responses and re-building process components to fit the new Mosaic structure.
Large unitary authority (January 2016 – February 2018)
- Choice-based Lettings priority application
The online application for Choice-based Lettings has been an immediate success, the form is able to calculate many elements of the application (for example, based on the household composition is it really overcrowded?) and provides information to the back-office team in a consistent format which makes processing the application quicker and more efficient. - Homelessness – Quick screening and full application
The homelessness project started with a quick form to help determine whether the applicant would be eligible for homelessness services and offer advice based on their answers to the screening questions. - Homelessness – Triage for interim accommodation
The triage process was previously entirely paper-based. This project delivered an e-form process built in the Firmstep Platform which used Service for the initial triage before officers picked up subsequent stages in Dash. The process contained some complex form techniques using tools such as SQL integrations, JavaScript, and the built-in calculations in Forms. - H-CLIC data submission
Early in 2018 we worked with the customer’s internal web team to help them understand the needs of the new H-CLIC data format and the implications that the new reporting structure has for their existing homelessness processes.
District authority with own housing stock (Feb 2017)
- SQL development – Self-service data source
Develop migration scripts to produce data source used by Firmstep self-service “MyAccount”. The customer already had a reporting MS SQL database that held a nightly extract from their housing system so the requirement was to manipulate data they already held into a format that was easy for MyAccount to use.