DES MG IDF

A large-scale academic project

OBJECTIVE : to produce a useful tool to monitor interns at the administrative level (internship vacancy and online enrollment) as well as at the educational level (assistance for choosing a host organization and feedbacks on the internship period).

The D.E.S. degree in General Medicine brings together students from the 7 Faculties of Medicine in Ile-de-France.

Since 2006, the school has used the services of G-Design to develop a website that can centralize the management of internships for over 3000 students.

 

website build by G-Design

The challenges of the project

To complete the project, G-Design had to overcome several issues :

  • to use a single tool to meet requirements of all sorts, different from one Faculty of Medicine to the other.

  • to take into account how needs change over the long term and bear in mind technological advances to satisfy them most adequately by building a flexible and powerful solution.

  • to provide a user-friendly solution to achieve complex administrative tasks requiring to collect massive information and to set different authentication levels in order to uphold the privacy of personal data.

 

« Gunther Groenewege is a rigorous person, he allowed us to test the site before launch and offered long-term project monitoring (over many years !). These are as many reasons for which I would recommend G-Design in my professional circle. »

— Michel Nougairede, Head of Department at the Faculty of Medicine of Paris Diderot

Our solutions

G-Design attached importance to meet with the different groups of users to make sure he was receptive to all project stakeholders’ needs.

Giving priority to direct contact with clients and agile development methodologies enabled G-Design to be flexible and reactive while handling evolving requests over more than 6 years of collaboration!

Finally, G-Design fitted all given tasks into a professional and rigorous framework in order to put anticipation at the heart of a complex and ambitious project. A series of automated testings were carried out as the project was growing with the aim to eliminate all risks of bugs related to site development. A test server also provided the client the option to validate each new function before the site was deployed.

Some recent changes

To make all the necessary improvements in terms of website usability and performance, G-Design developed major enhancements.

HOMEPAGE

homepage website

Problem with the homepage: the new students found it difficult to find the path to enrol on the website on their first visit.

Proposed solutions
  • simplify the homepage interface to make most common tasks more accessible
  • highlight a help section
  • run "user testings" in order to submit the possible changes to the students themselves.
Outcome

The number of phone calls to the secretariats of the Faculties was promptly reduced.

TICKETS

support ticket system

Problem with information flow: the comments posted on the site requiring feedback (complaints from students about the internship period, errors in the information page…) were too scattered to be processed efficiently.

Proposed solutions
  • produce a centralized tool so that each published post might be commented, discussed and, if necessary, monitored individually by someone in charge of making things run smoothly.
Outcome

Problems can be solved more efficiently, with no risk of omission. When actions are undertaken, it is easier to visualize in one go the current status of the project.