Our solution
The existing Global Health Network platform is an integrated set of components and features that serve a diverse range of concerns, from site discovery to content- and user-management, to professional development and training.
It is a complex body of software often built with an eye to solving immediate problems without formal consideration of future needs. Refactoring the code to cater for a more flexible custom skills and competencies hierarchy will have an unpredictable impact. Our objective was to mitigate these impacts and support separation of software from operational concerns.
The tasks to be completed were phased as follows:
- Build and test a synthetic data suite which will mimic a random skills and competencies hierarchy of varying structure,
- Import synthetic data and audit the impact in terms of failure in core, analytical and visual elements of the software,
- Fix and test software under a variety of synthetic data scenarios,
- Import structured data for WHO requirements and audit the impact as for 2,
- Fix and test software to ensure that it supports the WHO data structure.
Once this was completed, we developed the main infrastructure requirements, along with dashboards and visualisations to support professional development by individuals and team managers.
Outcomes
This was a project which needed to be delivered carefully and in stages so as not to disrupt existing software. TGHN now has over 1 million users across the world.
