MGT Consulting Group: Assessment Portal Application Design & Development
MGT Consulting engaged GRAYBOX to improve their questionaire database, a system that lead individuals through a lengthy series of questions to capture data that would contribute to their improvement efforts. MGT was working with GRAYBOX to have a system that would more efficiently capture and store data in a more organized fashion. MGT worked with schools and specific government sectors to improve infrastructure.
Overall Outcome
GRAYBOX created an online software that gave MGT significant flexibility with their questionaire database.
The Results
MGT Consulting has a finalized software that allowed them to ask specific question and capture the right data to produce more streamlined consulting advice.
-
137Support of Assessment Locations
-
781Number of Database Assessment Fields
-
60%Reduction to their internal QC timelines per assessment
The Overall Problem
MGT Of America Consulting, LLC is a national consulting group that works with public sector organizations and nonprofits. They work to assess conditions of the school districts for their technology readiness, the property grounds, and their overall readiness for education, in order to begin this process they have school districts go through an assessment with nearly 700 questions. The software they had was very old and prevented them from accommodating the requests of schools. This software was built in 2001.
They found GRAYBOX after looking for a company with a broad variety of skills to tackle the improvements necessary for this assessment site, and not just a company specific to web development. They enlisted the help of GRAYBOX to build a web application to replace an existing Windows-based client application.
The Quality Control module in the new Basys App has been an enormous improvement over our previous process.
Our Solution
1. Information architecture
Prior to any design composition or development, the GRAYBOX team spent three months working with MGT to understand their system. As well as using the older software to understand what’s required and what can largely be improved. GRAYBOX worked with MGT to deeply understand the life of the assessor and what happens with the data at the end of it all. They learned where specific content was supposed to be flowing within the original assessment and what the significance of each current process was. This included understanding every aspect of MGT Consulting’s process within the public school sector.
2. Interface Planning
After beginning the project, GRAYBOX devoted six weeks for data and user interface planning. GRAYBOX worked with MGT to understand what happens on the data end, where each question’s answers were submitted and saved, and to understand why MGT is even using the data. Furthermore, GRAYBOX was able to begin designing patterns of how the system would flow after they had a better understanding of how the older assessment’s flow functioned. This meant having question categorization tiers similar to the previous flow, such as project level folders, assessment level folders, building level, and furthermore specific questions.
3. Assessment Application Development
GRAYBOX rebuilt the platform within Craft, a CMS that allows users to build elegant applications without the added measure of coding. The rebuilding process also included recreating the business logic, taking a lot of processes that were on excel sheets from brainstorming previously and migrating them onto the actual website.
The process of developing the application required repeated revision of visual mockups and design iteration. GRAYBOX worked closely alongside MGT to take their feedback and apply the changes from there. The entire development process took about six months to launch.
The Quality Control module in the new Basys App has been an enormous improvement over our previous process.
Our Services
GRAYBOX worked with MGT Consulting to create an online portal, providing a variety of digital services.
Our Results
MGT now has an adaptable assessment tool that is essential to their consulting work.
By the end of the project, MGT Consulting had a modern and flexible foundation that they can continue to evolve as their business needs change. Their users and their teams can access it anywhere across the country which is critical to their business as they work with other public school sectors.
Throughout the project, as MGT has had other additions to their goals, GRAYBOX has been able to incorporate them with ease because of the new program. What they have now is so adaptable that six months prior to launch, new business assessing model was proposed and designed which could never been done with their old application.
-
137Support of Assessment Locations
-
781Number of Database Assessment Fields
-
60%Reduction to their internal QC timelines per assessment
