Uplifting the Student Admission Process through Integrated and Responsive Web Design

Summary

Our customer, an entity responsible for tertiary education student assessments, sought to enhance their admissions process and system’s efficiency through collaboration with Chamonix IT Solutions. By implementing a hybrid team approach Chamonix helped to modernise the customer’s application, introducing an Angular web application, a new identity management system and modern API management practices, while preserving the existing business processing engine. This digital transformation provided numerous benefits, such as a responsive UI across multiple devices, a reduction in development and maintenance costs via a modern technology platform, enhanced security, and better visibility of the application process for students and staff. Furthermore, it enabled the up-skilling of our customer’s technical teams through the integration of agile and DevOps best practices.

The Challenge

• Legacy Application nearing end of life
• Costly on-premise hosting
• Complicated security boundary requiring uplift to mitigate against the changing threat landscape
• Limited opportunities to extend existing functionality
• Poor support for mobile and tablet use
• A lack of consistent identity for applicants between application periods
• Data duplication and re-entry across multiple applications

Background

Our customer is responsible for assessing students’ academic and non-academic qualifications and ranking eligible applicants for tertiary education courses.

As part of their strategic plan, our customer was seeking integration to create new and innovative ways to drive greater efficiency and unlock new value in the student admissions process. A key pillar in their technology strategy is the delivery of a holistic capability, which sits at a key juncture in enabling other projects to be delivered at future time horizons.

As a trusted technology partner Chamonix was approached to assist with a roadmap to modernise their systems in line with their technology strategy. Addressing aging platforms paved the way for modern transformation, which was a key part of this initiative. The main focus was their admissions portal which is a core element of the business’ operations, with Chamonix engaged to advise and subsequently enable the transformation of their application.

Solution

Chamonix was initially engaged to review our customer’s existing application landscape. As part of this review Chamonix assessed:

• The application catalogue
• Development and deployment methodologies
• Documentation and on-going maintenance and support
• Technical capabilities within our customer’s team

As part of this review our customer was seeking to understand what capability gaps existed within their team and what approaches could be utilised to provide up-skilling of their existing workforce.

A hybrid team approach was taken for the design, development and delivery of the new application. Core outcomes our customer was looking to achieve from this approach included:

• Establishing a best practices approach to agile software development
• Introduction and incorporation of DevOps practices within the customer’s application development and operations teams
• Up-skilling customer personnel in modern development methodologies and frameworks

Our Recommendation and Solution

As part of our hybrid approach, Chamonix worked with our customer to develop a scoping and implementation plan identifying the core components to be implemented to enable the realisation of the benefits. These included:

• Development of a new Angular front web application
• Establishment of a new identity management and modern authentication system
• Establishment of a new API management practices through APIM and Azure App Services

In order to deliver value quickly and enable the development team to focus on core outcomes, the existing business processing engine and integrations with tertiary institutions were retained. The interfaces into the business process engine were replaced with a modern API layer incorporating additional security controls and support for consumption by modern web application frameworks.

A dynamic resourcing model was adopted to ensure that the hybrid team had access to the required skills as needed. Chamonix was responsible for architecture, application design and development leadership, working closely with our customer to support their development and QA teams, and taking direction from our customer’s application owner and SME’s.

This project represented a significant shift in the way application development and maintenance was performed by our customer. Core to this was the introduction of a DevOps approach and associated practices focusing on automation, standardisation and reduction of heroics, particularly in relation to patching, configuration and deployment.

Business Benefits

• Responsive and accessible modern UI supportive of use across desktop, tablet and mobile devices
• Modern technology platform to:
  • Reduce the cost of development and maintenance
  • Increase the accessibility of skilled staff within the marketplace
  • Increase platform longevity
• Cloud first approach including reduction of operational costs
• Increased security posture in line with evolving threat landscape
• Better visibility of the application and offer process for students and staff
• Dynamic branding for institutions through white labelling providing a better user experience with their systems and processes
• Establishment of standards and best practices for Angular development and DevOps
• Up-skilling of existing customer technical teams
• Reduction of error rate and event response effort
• Reduced friction for the user registration and general experience, leading to a higher volume of applicants

Solutions & Services

• Application Development
• Web Development
• DevOps
• Testing
• Integration
• Delivery Management
• Project Management
• Business Analysis