I ended up in a business after hearing a prototype had been made, but that prototype was going off course and not matching the contract – so a lawsuit was being filed against the developers. The product was a combined training & reporting platform for the clients of the business. Due to the nature of the industry there was high turnover in the support staff so the product was to help bring staff up to speed rapidly along with streamline the reporting requirements that a disability provider needs to do. The NDIS was coming, so the founder was trying to get ahead of this. This business was looking for a rebuild of the product, along with an overall IT person who could sort out the entire business IT needs. Let’s dive in with what we see so far.
| Beneficial | Concerning |
|---|---|
| Established business | A bit of uneasiness amongst admin staff |
| Seemingly unlimited funding | Very bull in a china shop founder |
| Clean slate for IT | Rapid change of direction |
| Doing good things for the clients | Very much the admin staff were doing a lot of the heavy lifting |
| Office in amongst other startups – good community | |
| Somewhat clear scope of the product |
To give a hint of what was to come, this was the prominent piece of the welcome pack I received.
Initial IT Setup
Training was a big part of the product, we were to populate an office with all new Learning Design & Graphic staff, and unify the admin staff. With the clients being non-adult with disabilities there were a few key rules from the founder:
- The data cannot breach borders (eg. no cloud)
- The data must remain on-site
- Data security is paramount
- No laptops as they can be removed from site
- No wifi
So I went about sourcing all new desktops, displays, keyboards & mice to cater for the graphic/training requirements, my development requirements, and administration’s needs. A local server was provided as a raid storage (I can’t recall the brand – synergy?) and a dedicated pfsense firewall was sourced to provide a strong barrier from outside traffic, yet allow internal internet access for the graphic/training teams. I believe there were even VLAN’s to separate admin desktop traffic off.
A few rules that came with this:
- No auto-saving of passwords within the browser
- No USB keys
- Desktops must be locked when leaving the desk
- There were two rotating backup drives which were encrypted, and rarely taken off-site due to the founder’s instructions.
That’s as good as it could be. We had our internal network created and all staff with decent hardware & software. On to developing the product.
The previous product
I sat down with the founder to find out what happened with the previous development. While I’m not a lawyer, it was very clear that the requirements while agreed to in a contract had changed from the founder’s end (see the earlier diagram) and therefore it was a forever development – so to me the founder was probably breaching the contract. However the contract agreed to the product being developed with a specific technical set but from what was mentioned it didn’t sound like it was in the traditional sense – and this was a very grey area. I left it to the founder and never heard about the lawsuit again.
Scoping the new product
It was impossible to pin down what the founder required (which explained the previous troubles), so I sat down with him for around an hour, asked a few questions, and sketched it – this became the basis of what was to be built with a note to the founder that it may only be 90% what he needs, however that will make it the multi-tenant scalable commercial SaaS that he wants. It’s what I have advised founders many times – they get more of a product if they have a little bit of give. And we have to somehow hide the haphazard style of management after all. This is what it will be:
- Ability to produce reports on the clients daily
- Ability to train the clients & staff with a built in LMS training module
- Ability to track the training, produce awards & certificates
- Ability to license this platform to other disability organisations
- Mobile & desktop friendly, so that on-site staff can receive alerts if tasks hadn’t been done within required timeframes or on required days
- Clients can be assigned to multiple locations which can all reside within the one business.
Also a few things happened at this time – the original admin staff had all left with minimal replacements. And I had shown the founder a dashboard example (material UI) to see if that overall themed appearance would work for the product, the founder had an adverse reaction to how much was on screen. So that meant I had to design this very simple with minimal information on screen at each time – not overwhelming.
The Rise
The IT system and development of the platform supported the company growth up to around 10 admin staff, all developing training materials to sit within the platform itself. There were videographers, graphic artists, learning designers, managers, creative writers. It was a well oiled machine developing quality content, and the platform had become a modular SaaS with reporting and tracking of the users progress within the training courses.
I’ll get technical for a moment as it was interesting, some notes about the platform:
- Designed with Materialise as the UI framework, to have a nice responsive UI for desktop, tablet, and mobile use.
- CodeIgniter as the backend with a MySQL database
- LMS support was provided by borrowing the javascript SCORM engine from Moodle, reverse engineering the communications (AJAX), and building the API’s to support it
- There was a trick I recall as the training course files coming from the Articulate software were too large. So when a SCORM file was uploaded it was a zip file underneath. The platform would uncompress it, locate all the JPG and PNG image files, recompress them at a lower quality or higher compression, and rewrite the SCORM package. This allowed the training file to be accessed with much slower data connections as was available on-site.
- There were automated alarms/alerts tracking when a task was meant to happen and if it hadn’t happened within a certain timeframe.
- The users had complex groups and permissions – with the UI adjusting to reflect what they should and shouldn’t see. This is always a huge timesaver as you only need to build one UI, but it tends to confuse admins as they are used to dedicated admin interfaces / sections.
- It featured a dynamic spreadsheet builder, to keep the data centralised and compliant, yet allowing for flexibility just as any spreadsheet does.
The Fall
Despite how well the development and training was all going, the founder ran the whole business like the early diagram, and this reflected in their personality and therefore the overarching company culture.
It was somewhere during this time that the founder had a chat with me, showing a platform built by a different disability provider. They made it known that they used to work for this provider. The platform was actually a competitor to what they had hired me to build. It was clear this platform was a way to get back at that provider. To try and get even for something.
It was a toxic environment caused by the one person in power after revenge, who would target an individual staff member and break them mentally until they departed. To have the platform and amazing training materials as a result of this was nothing short of a miracle, but the company couldn’t survive. So much went on that if written it would be impossible to sound believeable. To keep it simple the staff reduced one by one until I was targeted & had to depart.
Retrospective
Regarding the original development and the lawsuit, I have discovered many years later that the founder actually won over the simple requirement of it specified as being built using a specific technology stack. And while it was actually using that exact stack underneath, the application wasn’t developed in a way that a customer would expect when mentioning that stack. Make sure to double and triple check when the founder is a little unclear.
The platform survived for a while, as I assisted rotating contractors and new staff to get it running in different offices. However I am unsure how much longer it did last, or if the training materials were used or continue to be used. It’s unfortunate as there were some groundbreaking ideas within that business and a fantastic team underneath, just the founder should have stepped back & relinquished control of the business to a CEO to help it run smoothly.