Azend Technologies recently concluded a keystone project with a leading United States-based franchisor of educational learning centers to overhaul their Marketing Communications Program portal. The franchisor is the oldest provider of supplemental educational services for primary and secondary students in the USA and is the market leader in subject tutoring and exam preparation.

The franchisor’s previous portal, or MCP, was long overdue for enhancement, and the feature-rich successor version was launched on December 06th for their Franchisees. The portal is now being used by 275 learning centers that annually serve over a half-million students across the USA.

The purpose of the program is to increase awareness amongst parents and students about available programs, and to help reenroll students into additional services that the company provides. The new portal offers advanced features for the franchisor to define solicitation and referral campaigns that narrowly target different student demographies, and for franchisees to selectively enroll in these campaigns and grow their tutoring services across their respective student populations.

Eric, the company’s Senior Director of Application Development expressed the following sentiments. “Empowering education through innovation, our company and Azend Technologies are working to redefine how we approach student engagement. The Marketing Communications Program (MCP) portal that we developed in collaboration with Azend is focused on personalized experiences and strategic outreach. This enhanced portal serves as a catalyst for us to reconnect over 275 learning centers with the families and students in their local communities. The MCP program stands as a testament to our commitment to amplifying educational opportunities and revolutionizing the way students explore and enroll in tailored educational services, ultimately shaping a brighter future for their education.”

The approach taken by the project team was somewhat unusual, where an “Agile Product Design” phase preceded a more typical Scrum-based development exercise. Product stakeholders and users from the Franchisor and various franchise centers, together with Azend business analysts, brainstormed iteratively to discover and document business requirements as user stories. These user stories were prioritized, and rapidly illustrated by a sleek UX-prototype, that in turn was allowed to evolve through collective user feedback.

There were several reasons for this approach of front-loaded requirements discovery, such as the availability of actual center users and the need to maintain their focus, and the need to rapidly evolve a visual prototype that would gain their consensus.

“We are happy to have facilitated this significant step in the digital transformation journey of our prestigious American client,” commented Oshan, Chief Delivery Officer of Azend. “We were not hesitant to evolve the application’s user experience through real user feedback, going through many iterations of change during the discovery phase and discarding many painstaking efforts. This true-Scaled Agile approach helped us to arrive at the most intuitive and useful experience for the clientele of the franchise. We were Agile in design, and subsequently we were further Agile in development, where we fine-tuned many features to the taste of users. A great deal of effort was put in by our client stakeholders and our Development, UI/UX, QA, BA, DevOps and Program Management teams to produce the winning outcome. We are delighted at this success.”

Azend Technologies is a software services company headquartered in Colombo, Sri Lanka with affiliations in the USA and the United Kingdom. They provide software development consulting services to a global clientele, as well as incubate their own software products, including Govi.ai and Careers360.