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Case Studies
Website Redesign Enhances Sales Capabilities, Streamlines Process Efficiency
Project at a Glance |
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RDA redesigned this nonprofit organization's website with a focus on two functional areas: the portion of the website that school financial aid administrators use and the log-in process for both school administrators and borrowers. The new site provides our client with the same level of services as competitor offerings, which allows the sales team to be better equipped to show prospective schools what their company can offer. |
About Our Client
RDA's client is a nonprofit organization that specializes in providing student loans for graduate and professional education.
Background
Our client had launched a series of initiatives centered on the reengineering and addition of functions and features to their website, the primary function of which is to support the loan origination and disbursement process.
The preceding phase (Phase 3) of the website redesign rewrote the website using Microsoft .NET technologies, including ASP.NET, C#, and .NET Remoting. It also integrated the website with a new backoffice application called AppWorks. RDA was involved with the AppWorks implementation project as well.
Phase 3 concentrated on porting existing functionality from ColdFusion code to .NET code and replicating functionality from the legacy backoffice system and AppWorks. As such, it added very little new functionality. Therefore, the application needed to be redesigned in order to make it more secure and easier to use. By undertaking this redesign, our client aimed to offer the same level of services as competitor offerings.
Solution Detail
This project (Phase 4) focused on two functional areas: the portion of the website that school financial aid administrators use, and the Login process for both school administrators and borrowers.
- Website Overhaul - This improved the effectiveness of the application, allowing easier and more efficient use by School Financial Aid Administrators (FAAs).
- FAA/Borrower Registration and Login - Functionality was needed to allow individual logins for FAAs (instead of the previous "One School-One Login" process), as well as defined security levels for different types of users at the school. From the borrower perspective, compliance issues necessitated that the use of social security number as User ID be changed. Additionally, both processes also required the integration of the PKI security process.
Challenges
This project began while the implementation of Phase 3 and AppWorks were still underway. Phase 4 began in September, and the production release of Phase 3/AppWorks did not take place until the following February.
This caused several challenges:- Subject Matter Expert (SME) availability. Since Phase 4 was concentrated on improving the site, the Phase 4 technical team needed much input from the client's business experts. Their time was being stretched between Phase 3, Phase 4, and their everyday jobs. To address this challenge, RDA extended the Elaboration phase to overlap with the Construction phase of the project. This allowed the SMEs' time to be maximized while keeping the project on schedule.
- Codebase synchronization. Since the Phase 4 codebase had to be branched from the Phase 3 codebase early in the project, it was necessary to keep the Phase 4 codebase updated with changes made to Phase 3. RDA performed these code synchronizations every week, carefully analyzing the files that changed in the Phase 3 codebase and implementing those changes into the Phase 4 codebase.
- Technical resource availability. Key members of the client's IT department, such as Database Administrators and Application Architects, were stretched thin between the concurrent projects. To overcome this challenge, the Phase 4 management team worked closely with the other project teams to coordinate the necessary resource allocation.
Benefits
Schools are the key to our client's business. Since this project dramatically improved the school section of the website, the sales team is better equipped to show prospective schools what their company can do for them. The improved school section also helps them retain current schools as clients.
The new site also allows schools to do many administrative tasks themselves that previously would have required a phone call to a company representative. This allows our client's representatives to focus on more value-added activities for schools.
The implementation of the enhanced Login and Registration process allows our client to stay in compliance with federally mandated regulations. In addition, it allows more granular tracking of the users of the website, on both the school and borrower sections of the website.
Technically Speaking
The website redesign was implemented using Visual Studio.NET 2005, ASP.NET 2.0, C#, Web Services, Dundas Charts, and a third party PKI authentication package called PassMark.
