Diocese of Des Moines
Overview:
The Diocese of Des Moines needed a custom progress report application for their school district. When we started the interview to determine requirements we found all the schools, a total of 18, were using completely different processes.
The Process:
The first step was to get everyone on the same page. The school held several meetings with principals and staff and gave us a good idea of their general requirements. We then worked closely with a few core people from the Diocese to finalize the design. After we went over their requirements and an additional few rounds of talks we came up with a fairly open schema as the foundation of the application. It was clear from the start that this application would evolve over time as we guided the staff to understand the possibilities of a web based application. We chose a backend of SQL Server and built our UI with ASP.NET/C#. Additionally we used a reporting package from Telerik to generate the progress reports in PDF format that are then printed and sent home with the student. We are currently discussing adding features such as parental access to allow a parent to view the progress report online and various import and export tools.
Results:
This application has several school years behind it and the teachers and principals are liking the time savings more and more. Since the first release in 2008 we have added many features suggested by the Diocese staff that have helped them streamline the whole process further. In the end we have helped cut down a weeks long process to one or two days.
