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Portfolio Development Experience Blog
Timeline
A comprehensive breakdown of the events, progress and breakthroughs that transpired throughout the course of the project
- Chapter 1-
Beginning
[17 - 23 October 2022]
Introduction
Selecting a challenge
We are tasked with selecting a challenge statement and be briefed about the schedule and further details.
Brainstorming
Ideation
The whole class was to share their thoughts and initial ideas on how we can solve the problems that Workato faces.
Group Formation
Random Selection
Team leaders were chosen based on the ideas that were the most appropriate and/or well thought off. We would then proceed to write our strengths an weakness on a piece of paper and fold it to hide our names that were written on the back. The team leads would then chose their team members based on said strengths and weaknesses
Gathering Requirements
Workato's Challenges & Needs
We would interview Mr Steven Hoon, Senior Manager of Business Technology Operations & Ms Lavanya Karthikeyan,
Program Manager Business Development. This is to learn more about how Workato operates and the software they use to ensure remote work compliance. Most importantly, we would need to gain an understanding and clarify some of the challenges that Workato faces. These information would be used to help us fine tune our ideas before we start developing the solutions.
- Chapter 2-
Planning
[24 October - 13 November 2022]
Trello
Goals & Communication
Setup a Trello Board to create product goals, user stories, tasks and track progress.
Building an idea
Formulating a solution
Our initial idea was:
When a company laptop is turned on, the system uses a simple update check function which checks that the essential desktop programs(security etc) are updated to the latest version via the internet.
If not updated to latest version, notification would pop up on screen. Notification has option to update right now, later or turn on auto update.
If updated to latest version, no pop up will show up.
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Our group got together in class to discuss the flow and improvements to the idea and possible software solutions.
Team Dynamic
Forming & norming
As we were still unfamiliar with the new faces in our group, we made an effort to include one another during the discussions. This ensures that every voice is heard and teammates are more comfortable with working with one another in the future.
Research & Development
Software, functions & Integration
We research a plethora of software that we can use to store data, create and display visualizations. We also researched documentations, functions and methods to integrate all of them into a single smooth flowing solution.
Small scale test and experimentation was also done to test the feasibility of our idea so that we can improve it.
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We adopted an iterative process to constantly improve our idea and define a clear scope and solution for our upcoming Hackathon.
Break
Christmas Holidays!
- Chapter 4 -
Back To School
[2 - 23 January 2023]
~Sprint 2~
Welcome Back!
Resume Development
After much-needed break over the new year holiday, we come back to continue developing our solution. We would incorporate feedback given by Workato from the Hackathon and make adjustments and improvements to our current solution.
Trying a new Solution
A 90° turn
Due to the negative feedback we received from Workato after the hackathon, we decided to move the idea and solution in a different direction.
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Now instead of running remote system diagnostics on employee's devices to check whether their software were up to date with the latest versions, we decided to focus more on reminding Workato employees to go for their security trainings. The reason being that during the previous sprint, more time and development effort went into creating the integrated reminder system.
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Thus, with a smaller scope we would be able to focus all our efforts in creating a significantly improved reminder system.
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The first major change would be the inclusion of course-ware on a learning management system (LMS). This would allows to have a more detailed and in-depth view of an employee's learning progress. We found an open source LMS called IILIAS where we would set up the roles and courses for users to do.
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The second major change would be that we are hosting a website using the Model-View-Controller (MVC framework) to display dashboards for each employee. It would have a login and a page where visualizations and metrics would be displayed, telling the employees what courses they are yet to complete and/or are nearing the deadline. There would also be a page where they can configure which LMS they want to obtain the data from. This website would consolidate and display all necessary course data in one place and make requests based on the LMS and settings they chose. This would be much more convenient than individually logging in to each LMS and navigating to their courses to view their progression.
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Challenges
Management & Integration
However as it is our first time using the ILIAS learning management system, we had difficulties using the software. Initially we were unable to create any courses as we were not given administrative rights. Navigating the LMS was also difficult as there were a lot of buttons and settings to configure. It was also unclear as to how we can obtain the metrics.
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Another signigifcant challenge we face was integrating ILIAS and our website. There is little documentation online as to how we can parse the data to our website via API but thanks to Joshua's technical skills, we were able to do so.
Rethink, Reconsider, Redo
A 45° turn
When we check back with the lecturer regarding the progress of the work. We received an overwhelmingly negative feedback as the work we have done so far is relatively small with minimal progress.
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Another issue was that we we prioritizing too much on the development of the back-end part (ILIAS & APIs) of our solution when the front end section (Dashboard & Notification System) was Workato's focus.
Initially, we still decided to go ahead with our idea. However after spending 5 consecutive days of development, it was all for naught as we ran into the API problem. Even though Joshua was able to connect and parse the data to be displayed on our website, We were unable to identify the fields and data we need.
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Short on time with the deadline fast approaching, we decided to quickly think and rapidly develop a new solution.
- Chapter 5 -
Finale
[24 January - 5 February 2023]
~Sprint 2~
New Idea
Practicality Over Complexity
With little time left, we came together as a team to discuss a new strategy and idea.
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As our current solution was difficult to work with and had several bugs. We decided to reuse the concept of the idea of displaying a dashboard for each employee but instead of building a website and dashboard from the ground up, we decided to use a third party app to create courses and track progression.
Odoo HRMS
Human Resources & Courses
I found a software called Odoo HR which is a human resource tool with a learning management system integrated into it. It is able to track the learning progress of each individual employee and course they are enrolled it.
Google Sheets
Integration & Data Storage
We found out that we can export the learning progress statistics as excel file.
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At the same time, we also found out that the Workato platform has an existing integration with Google Sheets. Therefore we had to export the Excel file to Google Sheets in order for it to be used by Workato.
Ui Path
Integration & Automation
However we have a problem, as the data is constantly updated on a daily basis. We would have to constantly export the data to the Google Sheets which is not practical if we were to do it manually,
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Therefore, we introduce UI Path, an automation software that can helps us transfer the data from Odoo HR to the Google Sheets via Microsoft Excel.
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By setting a fixed time, we can let the macro script run automatically and unsupervised to update the data.
Piecing it together
Merging our work together
Checkpoint 1 + 2
We combined our new solution with our previous work by passing the data to our already created Workato recipes that would send notifications, Databox visualizations and other useful information via Outlook & Slack.