SaaS portal for a housing community
Housing Systems Solutions, Inc. teams up with Itransition for full-cycle development of a powerful set of ASP.NET cloud-based applications united in a single and comprehensive solution.
Problem
Customer
Our Customer is a USA-based company providing end-to-end technology-based solutions for the public and affordable housing community.
The company was created with the intent to assist more than 800 public housing authorities (PHAs) in the USA in their social mission — implementation of housing insurance programs leveraged by about 3 mln people.
Project Objectives
Automation and enhancement of all current business practices, as well as ensured regulatory compliance and covered reporting needs would enable PHAs to cut costs and reduce excessive administrative efforts hindering efficiency of housing insurance programs implementation. Besides, the Customer was aiming to provide a web-based solution delivered to the end users on demand, without the cost of installing PC software.
Solution
Automatization
The solution under development is represented by a comprehensive suite of cloud-based applications supporting implementation of Section 8 and Public Housing programs. It provides a robust set of features and modules to increase productivity and efficiency of some 800 PHA’s operations.
The following processes are automated:
- applications management;
- queries management and cleansing;
- apartment inspection procedures;
- contracting;
- payments tracking and status update.
The solution is complemented with an online portal used by over 3 million people to submit applications:
The system processes an impressive amount of data including personal records on applicants, scanned documents, health records, income data, etc.
A reporting solution complements the system to give PHAs the critical insight they need into their day-to-day operations, progress towards long-term objectives, adherence to compliance requirements and the overall health of their organizations.
Process
Technology Overview
.NET is the core technology selected by the Customer for system implementation. The website is built on ASP.NET MVC framework, with separate views, but reused controllers and presentation models for desktop browsers and mobile devices. This provides for reduced code duplication alongside with the required optimization for mobile devices.
ASP.NET Web API framework was implemented to build RESTful web services reaching a broad range of clients, with WebService Façade for any external applications that may intend to use the system functionality.
JasperReports – an open source Java reporting tool – was utilized for reporting solution implementation.
Team
The collaboration was initiated with a pilot project: Itransition’s team of 6 specialists determined architecture design and key system aspects in close collaboration with the Customer's business analysis team. During the core part of the project, 7 full-fledged teams were working on delivery of a powerful set of ASP.NET cloud-based applications united in a single and comprehensive solution.
Full Cycle Development Coverage
Within the scope of the project, the resources delivered by Itransition covered all project needs and all stages of application development, from business analysis and interviewing end users for requirements elicitation to application design, development and end-to-end testing to solution deployment and user guides and system documentation preparation. Moreover, an independent Itransition’s QA department was involved to cover all the project quality assurance needs.
Most Beneficial Collaboration Scheme Adopted
The collaboration was built on a well-balanced offshore–onsite team distribution model, with flexible onsite presence and the bulk of development resources based offshore. This enabled the Customer to drastically reduce development costs, while maintaining team integrity and consistency of the large-scale IT project goals.
Value Adding Project Management
Itransition’s project managers combined Earned Value Management (EVM) principles typically used in implementation of government projects with Agile delivery methods refined to perfection at Itransition, leveraging Scrum velocity metrics and burn down charts.
Such approach enabled us to focus on the rapid delivery of customer requirements and early customer feedback, while applying EVM metrics and the necessary project controls ensured contractual and regulatory compliance, enabling transparency in regards to the project costs, performance and forecast.
Results
Itransition managed to become not just a technology vendor for the Customer, but rather a partner, capable of sharing best practices and prioritizing project progress over contractual red tape.
Collaboration success prerequisites:
- Accurate technical and domain expertise match: Itransition provided specialists with the required technical background and domain knowledge.
- Competent input in the Customer’s in-house processes: Itransition’s specialists managed to build a truly collaborative relationship with the Customer.
- Full operations synchronization and delivery principles consistency across the Customer's and Itransition teams.
Itranstion showed a huge amount of commitment right from the forefront […] and they have grown beyond what we thought they would be initially.
[...] It’s been working excellent and I would recommend them to anybody who has a large scale application to develop.
