A Platform for Celebrating Caregivers

For the past 3 months we’ve had the pleasure of working with a charitable organization called the Ceca Foundation.

Ceca, which is derived from “​celebrating caregivers”, was established in 2013 to celebrate caregiver excellence and “to promote high patient satisfaction by recognizing and rewarding outstanding caregivers”. They do this by providing employees of caregiving facilities with a platform for recognizing and nominating their peers for the Ceca Award – a cash reward given throughout the year. These facilities include rehabilitation centers, hospitals, assisted living centers and similar organizations.

CC Pace partnered with Ceca to build their next generation, customized nomination platform.

This was one of those projects that fills you with pride. First, for the obvious reason – Ceca’s worthwhile mission. Second, the not-so-obvious reason, which was the development process. It was a great example of why I enjoy helping customers build products.

The process

For various reasons, Ceca was under a tight deadline to get the new platform up-and-running for several facilities. The Agile process turned out to be a great fit, as it allowed for frequent customer feedback and weekly deployments to a testable environment. We developed the platform using high-level feature stories, rather than detailed specifications. This allowed the team to concentrate on the desired outcome, rather than getting caught up in the technical details. At times, we had to forgo a software-based solution in favor of a manual process. When you have limited resources and time, you have to make these types of decisions.

In February, after about 3 weeks, the Ceca Foundation launched the new web platform for one facility and then quickly brought on several more. There was immediate gratification for the team as we watched the nominations flood in.

The “feel good” story

What made this project successful and enjoyable at the same time? I’m reminded of the first value in the Agile manifesto – individuals and interactions over processes and tools. Some factors were technical but most were not:

• a motivated and enthusiastic customer (Ceca)
• a set of agreed upon features to provide the Minimum Viable Product
• frequent collaboration with the customer
• a cloud-hosted environment to provide infrastructure on-demand for testing and live versions
• a software-as-a-service model that allowed us to quickly bring on new facilities

For me, it was Agile at its most fundamental: discuss the desired features; provide a cost estimate for those features; negotiate priority with the customer; provide frequent releases of working software.

Check out the Ceca Foundation for more information. You can see a demo of the software under “Technology​“.