Building Online Programs – Software Development

Client location

New York, UNITED STATES

Business area

Education

Product

Web Platform

Delivery center

Guadalajara, MEXICO

Project type

Development & R&D

About the client

As educated consumers increasingly demand online degrees from brand-name universities, many institutions struggle to go online or build great online programs. Our client, a New York-based company, helps leading universities build winning online programs by augmenting their in-house expertise with assistance from best-of-breed providers in core functions, including marketing, recruitment, instructional design, and analytics. This revolutionary approach to “online program management” creates better programs, bigger enrollments, and more satisfied students.

Since 2013, our client has designed, built, and managed dozens of online undergraduate and graduate programs for many well-known colleges and universities in the U.S.

The company’s objective is to increase the number of online programs and attract larger numbers of students.

Technologies used

The challenge

The client decided to conduct a third-party application maintenance project. Therefore, they were looking for the right outsourcing development team to make an efficient staff augmentation, with highly skilled IT specialists and a particular tech expertise.

Pentalog’s Guadalajara team stepped in and took over this challenging project, enabling all their in-house resources to further push the client’s project.

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The solution

The first phase focused on salvaging part of the product for business intelligence and data visualization previously developed by another partner.

The challenge was to find a temporary solution for one of the more damaging issues they had. To do that, as a starting point, one Pentalog React developer partnered up with the client’s development team.

After things became more stable, the front-end and back-end programmer team started working on completely replacing the product by building a brand-new system. The data warehouse was already in place.

Shortly after this phase, a .NET developer, another React developer, and a Project Director from Pentalog joined the team that implemented functionalities for customized data visualization for the different end-clients.

After a few months, at the end of 2019, the team managed to stabilize the product and then began work on new product features. The client presented the prototype at the beginning of 2020 at an event dedicated to the industry.

Then, in the summer of 2020, they reached new highs, managing to ensure additional funds for the project and gathering more users (such as other stakeholders and teams from each university involved).

Since then, the Pentalog team has handled the development of more functionalities and adjustments. Now, the client’s dynamic platform has many useful features such as analytics, permission systems, customized login pages for the partner-universities, and an optimized workflow for releases of visual elements that increased the team’s delivery capacity.

The results

The client was always very open to new ideas. For example, recently, Pentaguys have suggested useful functionalities that they managed to quickly implement due to the client’s prompt response.

Moreover, the client’s agile teams, which are very well organized, helped Pentaguys to integrate through transparent communication, a collaborative work style, and celebrating success. They knew how to make each contributor feel valued in the process of building a great digital product.

We felt really proud when one of the end-users characterized the product as top-notch UX, with great data and results visualization. In terms of business intelligence (BI), these visualizations help users make better data-based decisions.