University Health Care System (UHCS) www.universityhealth.org
The first step of the process is establishing a problem. What is that missing link keeping your focus off day to day business? Who can help? Sometimes, all you need is the advice of a friend. Enter the Cyber Mavens. Mark first met the Director of Corporate Communications at University Hospital through a mutual friend. The need for an improved project system had been the buzz around the office for months. A new team member mentioned a company that specializes in web-based solutions. Out of this mention, a lasting business relationship between Cyber Mavens and UHCS’s Corporate Communications Department was born.
THE PROBLEM: Corporate Communications needed an improved system to track and manage their Public Relations, Community Outreach and Marketing projects.
In the initial meeting with the Corporate Communications team, Mark analyzed their project system. The team was running a Microsoft Access desktop database on a shared drive. This system was slow and insecure. It severely lacked validation and error handling. The team concurred with Mark’s analysis.
Additionally, the data and reports were not accessible from outside the office. Technology rapidly moved toward mobility. In 2019, the concepts of mobility and immediacy are standard. The Corporate Communications team is not your typical marketing department, merely producing ads and hosting special events. There are critical issues that come up and require the quickest responses. The hospital needed a system that was reliable and could keep up with the changing world.
Mobility wasn’t even the biggest concern – security and privacy were. The old system lacked standard input validation. Also, the prior system didn’t prevent the duplication of projects.
THE SOLUTION: Which technologies and techniques were utilized in creating a project system that has held its own for more than a decade in an ever-changing, tech-driven world?
The database for the new project system was constructed using a Microsoft SQLserver. It was deployed on a web server allowing access from anywhere using secure SSL connections.
We built a custom website interface in JavaScript that granted different access levels to each Corporate Communications team member. The interface was user-friendly and provided the ability to create/close, update, manage and report on projects or tasks. Also, provided was the ability to track personnel, costs and advertising to specific projects.
Within the new system, features such as authentication, auditing, error handling and error tracking reduced downtime. The team could focus more on the projects at hand and less on calling IT for issues.
Another feature that freed up time for the team was the ability to make invoice payments from the Project System to UHCS Accounts Payable.
The Corporate Communications Department at UHCS is not your typical marketing firm. Community outreach is a large portion of where the team focuses projects. However, they do provide support to the doctors and the emergency teams. Efficiency was missing from their old project system. This was a crucial problem that the Cyber Mavens solved and continues to monitor and improve.
