Gruden – ‘Dream Team’ For SkillsDMC Solution

[Gruden]

At Gruden the greatest form of flattery is return business; and whilst we always aim to impress, the SkillsDMC site refresh was a definite standout.

SkillsDMC is a not-for-profit skills council for the Resource, Infrastructure and Construction industry. It provides tools, research and competency based training for individuals, work sites, companies and industry as a whole.

When asked to rebuild the existing website the development team at Gruden chose Sitecore CMS as the base platform as it best met the need for a scalable, flexible and easily updatable content management system.

The front-end was completely redesigned by our creative team with the focus being on overhauling the user interface into a streamlined user experience whilst retaining the brand.

The website included:

• predictive search functionality to allow users to quickly locate specific information from nearly 1000 different training units,
• the integration of a forums module for the reporting, management and display of training package feedback and
• a custom-built system for aggregating data to help SkillsDMC in updating and improving their training packages.

The result was an outstanding, integrated website that achieved SkillsDMC’s objectives and was subsequently nominated for the McFarlane Prize.

After completing their website we were approached once again by SkillsDMC to update their CD ROM based training and skills management tool – Skills Maximiser.

The brief was for Skills Maximiser to be adapted to allow data aggregation and information exchange between the website, the Sitecore CMS platforms and end-users in the field.

We decided a custom solution using Adobe Flex, the .NET MVC Framework and Sitecore CMS would be the best approach. The main focus was to make it easy for users who ranged from OH&S officers on construction sites in the CBD, to mine managers in the Kimberly to manage their data.

An advanced permissions system allowed a wide range of organisations to roll out the system in a way that makes sense to their business.

Being a non-regulatory body SkillsDMC could not mandate the use of this system. Instead it had to rely on these services to be well designed, easy to use and tailored to suit the needs of end-users to foster strong voluntary participation.

Before starting development of the application we planned and managed a comprehensive scoping and requirement gathering phase, involving multiple rounds of stakeholder and end user workshops, that effectively laid the foundations for the specification and construction of the tool.

As part of this methodology, personas were developed whereby each type of user was given a unique name as a reference point to define their characteristics, experience levels, vocabulary and touch points to help the Gruden developers design and build the application.

The Adobe Flex platform allowed us to deliver a complete online experience that enabled “Skills Maximiser” to be available to users on multiple platforms & browsers with rich, reporting tools to monitor competencies on an employee, position, site, region, company or industry level.

Throughout the design and build phases from constructing the wireframes and prototypes to user acceptance testing, the stakeholders and end users were continually involved to validate and refine our approach.

3 months after the go live date adoption rates had exceeded expectations. Of the 60 largest mining companies, 42 were using the application on 57 sites!

“In just a short time since its launch in April there has been a sharp uptake of the system within the mining industry to over 80%”, says SkillsDMC’s Operations Manager Dorothy Rao. “We found Gruden to be friendly, focused and most importantly they listened and delivered exactly what we wanted. They went the extra mile to deliver on an extremely tight deadline. They are a dream team!”

We’ve been working with Dorothy for over 5 years and this would have to be one of our best and most successful projects we’ve delivered to date. Check out the links below to find out more.

Visit SkillsDMC Website Refresh

Visit Skills Maximiser Page





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