IT Case Study (Parasol)

Overview

When your business is dependent on a bespoke software application to handle key functions there will come a point in its life when it will have to be upgraded. This ensures that it can continue to cope with circumstances that are likely to have changed since it was originally developed.

In an ideal world such upgrading would be continuous and iterative but resource and cost constraints mean many organisations are faced with dealing with the necessary changes in one project.

PROBLEM

Parasol, the UK’s leading contractor company, was faced with such a set of circumstances in 2008 as Sharon Hughes, business systems manager at the company explained. “Our portal is central to the high levels of service that we provide for our contractors. It was originally developed in Perl when the company was formed and over the years it had got increasingly difficult for us to adapt it to deal with changing circumstances.

“As a result we wanted to completely redevelop the portal from scratch so that we could better look after the needs of our 9,000 contractors. This would also enable us to add more functionality and automate a number of manual processes. But, the most important aspect would be that the new portal could be easily configured and changed both by our users and ourselves without the need for any further software development.”

AVOIDING PROJECT DRIFT

Parasol directly employed a number of developers but quickly realised that to meet the project time scales they would have to partner with an external software development company. “Our chief executive had a previous relationship with Gödel,” said Sharon, “so it made sense to take advantage of their skills.”

Gödel is a leading provider of high quality software development services for businesses in the UK, Europe and North America. With centres of excellence in Belarus and Romania, Gödel consultants have software technology and industry expertise that enables them to add value to any development project.

“We were particularly impressed with their video conferencing facility,” said Sharon. “We could see that this would ensure that although their developers were working remotely we could be in regular contact with them and ensure that there was no project drift.”

IMPROVEMENTS

The portal automates a number of important functions helping Parasol to provide financial support services to contractors and includes: handling billing to agencies or direct to client, sorting out PAYE TAX and VAT payments as well as National Insurance contributions.

The new portal would enable the contractors to better self manage their activities and thereby reduce calls to Parasol’s customer services team. It would aim to cover all the requirements of a self-employed contractor including:

• Contract management
• Timesheet management
• Business and rechargeable expenses management
• Holiday tracker
• Online payment and invoice tracker
• General account management

Once complete the new portal would ultimately provide a better experience for the user and help to improve customer satisfaction, providing Parasol with a competitive edge.

EXPERTISE AND EXPERIENCE

To ensure that the solution would be future proofed it was decided to develop it using the .Net framework with MySQL as the database back end. After a project initialisation phase in July 2008, work began on the actual development.

To provide more flexibility in scheduling tasks and resolving any hurdles which typically arise during a project Gödel used principles of agile development. This broke the project development into time-boxed development/testing iterations, each with a fixed duration of 2 weeks. Each iteration was designed to produce tangible results in terms of a working ‘snapshot’ of the product but with limited functionality.

Quality is obviously a key requirement and to ensure this was consistently maintained throughout the development each completed iteration needed to pass two rounds of verification – QA made sure that the feature was actually implemented and worked as specified. While technical verification ensured that the technical implementation was OK.

This approach meant that the Gödel developers in Belarus were in close and regular contact with Parasol’s developers in Warrington via Gödel’s video conferencing links.

BENEFITS

“Right from the start Gödel proved their worth,” said Sharon. “They very quickly scaled up their resources to ensure that development started on time and then built a close working relationship with our team here.

“As well as their agile development methodology they also introduced us Microsoft Team Foundation Server which helped to automate the software delivery process for this project for all the team members, whether they were in Warrington or Belarus. We now use this for all our development projects.

“We were faced with a number of challenges during the project but thanks to the expertise and flexibility of Gödel’s staff we were able to overcome these and have the new portal ready on time for the end of 2008.”

“The portal remains integral to the day to day operations of both Parasol and the thousands of contractors who rely on it to complete their assignments, ensure they get paid on time and pay the correct amount of tax.

“Thanks to the hard work of the team here and at Gödel, we have a robust, modern online portal that will provide the required levels of support moving forward.”

"Our existing software application had been in use for around two years but it had become evident that, as the businesses grew, it wouldn’t be able to cope with demand. We chose to work with GodelTech after receiving a recommendation from a contact. We’d looked at a number of companies but GodelTech’s attitude and approach to business set them apart from the rest."

Ian Jones, Head of IT at PAM Occupational Health

"Keeping ahead of the market place with cutting edge software is something that a partner like GodelTech is able to help us with. It’s scalable, so we can flexibly increase or decrease the team in Minsk should the need arise, and it provides us with a balance between efficiency and resource costs, which allows CACI to keep control over development and project expenditure."

Simon Kelly, Operations Director, CACI.