CommonPlaces Interactive

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I'm President of Ring at Home, a subscription-based service that provides Home Care Agencies and families with enhanced reminder services and wellness check-in calls that monitor the wellbeing of their seniors. Our focus is on low cost, low intrusion, zero-learning curve solutions that leverage existing technology in the senior’s home.

Our goal is to make seniors safe while they Age in Place. Our system monitors seniors, and then connects and informs the network of care providers and family members regarding their healthcare compliance and well-being. Our system is highly flexible and scalable.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire CommonPlaces Interactive, and what were your goals?

We were challenged on how to create a cost effective online application that would automatically call our customers and provide feed back. The application had to allow users to select different times for different days and types of calls. Checkins were once a day, medicine reminders were one to 5 times a day.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor and what were the deciding factors?

CommonPlaces had extensive experience developing custom solutions and interfacing with back end systems. They also could take incredibly complex application and design an easy to use interface for a consumer.

Describe the scope of work in detail, including the project steps, key deliverables, and technologies used.

Phase One: Front End

• Site Building - Creating Content types, taxonomy vocabularies and terms, views, forms, roles, permissions, blocks, pages, menus, and basic module configuration
• Templating - Creating Page, Block, Views, Form, and Field templates
• Theming - Mobile first theming, global style guide, custom styles
• Page build out - Building up to 10 pages with content.
• QA & Testing
• Project Management Phase Two – Front End
• E-Commerce Configuration - Configuring checkout process, gateway, transaction emails
• Drupal as an API - Configure Drupal as an API for the Scheduler to interact with.
• External Messaging API Support - Custom Module to integrate with IOT, SMS, and VOIP APIs
• Groups and Commerce Recurring Framework Integration - Custom Module to integrate a recurring product with a group membership
• Training
• QA & Testing
• Project Management Phase Three – Back End
• Scheduling API, Development - Development of Scheduler Database, Authentication Module, and Models to interact with front end and track jobs
• Scheduling API, Unit and Functional Testing - Complete Unit (machine) and functional (human) testing of every object developed in the scheduler API
• Scheduling API, third-party API integration (development) - Integration to schedule jobs directly to IOT, VoIP, email, and SMS devices utilizing credentials stored in the front end
• Scheduling API, third-party API integration (unit and functional testing) - Complete Unit (machine) and functional (human) testing of every object developed for third-party API Integration
• Training
• QA & Testing

How many people from the vendor's team worked with you, and what were their positions?

There were 45 people on the core team including a Project Manager, Architect, Designer and Developer.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any measurable outcomes of the project or general feedback about the deliverables?

The initial project came in on time and close to budget. As we got into Beta testing it became apparent that we had not realized all of the needs of our customers. CommonPlaces switched to an Agile development process that allowed us to add capabilities in an ongoing basis while we were testing.

Describe their project management style, including communication tools and timeliness.

Project Management was the best. They created a use case document that clearly outlined the roles and responsibilities of every user in the system. They built the system to this specification. We had weekly update meeting to insure the project was being developed correctly.

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

The CommonPlaces team built flexibility measures for capabilities we didn't think of. The application started out for a family with one senior. When then pivoted to agencies that multiple people supported multiple seniors. CommonPlaces had built in that capability so we could support agencies without input form us.

Are there any areas for improvement or something they could have done differently?

The initial planning took longer than expected. They were very detailed and we were not prepared to address all of their questions.