Northwest Independent Ruby Development

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

Behavioral Tech does training in a specific type of therapy called Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), and we’ve been around for about 20 years. I’m the customer service and operations manager.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Northwest Independent Ruby Development?

I inherited a project to bring a product called Linehan Suicide Safety Net to market. The program was developed by our sister organization, Behavioral Tech Research. Dr. Marsha Linehan owns both our company and Behavioral Tech Research. She is the developer of the DBT treatment.

It’s a program that is an online software for service that provides clinicians an opportunity to keep electronic records for clients that they are working with who are suicidal. It’s based on the Linehan Risk Assessment Measurement Protocol, which is a suicide risk assessment and management protocol used within DBT. People can create client records and attribute risk assessments to their clients and can access that information from anywhere that they have an internet connection using any browser. That’s what we worked with Northwest Independent Ruby Development on.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Behavioral Tech Research developed Linehan Suicide Safety Net with a grant. It was a phase I grant that was deemed good enough to go to market with. Usually, things go to market only after a phase II grant. Though in the original development the user side of the program was fully developed there were a number of gaps in the administrative features of the program so there was still additional work needed before we could take it to market. Because it’s a program that works with client protected health information, it needed to have an HIPAA review and audit, so there were extra things we needed to do to make the program HIPAA compliant.

NIRD helped us put the features that were missing in place to make the program HIPAA compliant. That was what we originally hired NIRD for. In the process of doing that, we discovered several development issues with the program that made it unstable from a development perspective, which is not what you want when you are working with an HIPAA-compliant program.

It started out with a small scope of work, but we quickly identified there was a lot more work needed. We ended up totally reworking two parts of the program on the backend to make it more stable so that we could bring it to market.

How did you come to work with Northwest Independent Ruby Development?

We found NIRD by doing a search for Seattle-based Ruby on Rails developers. In addition to meeting both of these criteria- NIRD also had experience working with HIPAA compliant programs. 

How much have you invested with Northwest Independent Ruby Development?

It’s been about $45,000. The original work wasn’t super significant, but there were many issues that NIRD helped us work through.

What is the status of this engagement?

We hired NIRD late spring 2015 to do the simple few things we thought needed to be done to finish the program and software and take it to market. We were hoping to get it done in two months, but over the course, we started to realize there were serious problems with the code, so there were two timelines we were working with.

The original scope of work took 2–4 months to identify the problem. We then came together again 2–4 months later and re-did the scope of work and made it much broader. It became a more comprehensive overhaul of a couple of segments of the program. That work started in January/February 2016 and finished in July/August 2016.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Could you share any evidence that would demonstrate the productivity, quality of work, or the impact of the engagement?

We didn’t track metrics. We’re not a software development company. Our metric is “Is it working?” and it’s working now. We don’t have as many issues as we did. For reasons that weren’t due to NIRD’s work on the program, we just went to market with it three weeks ago, so it’s new in the marketplace. We haven’t gotten a ton of feedback externally. Internally, from the staff, a lot of the work that NIRD did impacts the administrative support of the program, and it’s made it easier to support for our staff than it was originally. We are not experiencing any of the issues that we had before their help doing the overhaul.

How did Northwest Independent Ruby Development perform from a project management standpoint?

NIRD manages really well. We had a designated project manager who was keeping track of the work, communicating with all the individual developers, and moving things along. I appreciated having that as we were working with them. Major communication was via email. They also set us up with a Pivotal Tracker account to keep track of bugs and issues that needed resolving and features that needed to be put in place. We had different tickets in there. It was easy for me to track where they were on something. Whether something was being worked on, or if they were still waiting to get to it, along with where the last discussion item was, and if that particular issue was resolved. It was all in one place, so that was nice. Because we had to test things on our side, it took longer than we expected. That was more due to the program than their work on it.

What did you find most impressive about Northwest Independent Ruby Development?

I really enjoyed working with NIRD. I’ve worked with other developers who aren’t as good about translating what development issues need fixing to someone who is not a developer. I’m not a developer myself. No one here in the organization is. They are good at translating to us what they need to do as a developer to make the program work. If we’re looking at a program saying, “This is what we see is wrong with it,” they can translate it from our user experience issues to what needs fixing on the development side.

Are there any areas Northwest Independent Ruby Development could improve?

I don’t have any suggestion off the top of my head.