Project Term: Winter 2019
The Spence Neighbourhood Association works with the community to provide safety for residents, staff, volunteers, and the homeless. The system used for administering and organizing association staff, volunteers, and participants was taking valuable time away from important activities.

BIT and BTM staff built a system that enables staff to effectively collect, report on, and monitor attendance, supplies, food served, and program activities.

Background

The Spence Neighbourhood Association is a non-profit organization that works with people of Spence to revitalize and renew their community. The areas of their work include Holistic Housing, Community Connecting, Community Economic Development, Environment and Open Spaces, and Youth & Families. A new program has been introduced by the organization named WE 24 (West End 24) Safe Space, which is an overnight assistance program open from 11:00 pm to 7:00 am. During this time, the area is regularly patrolled and shelter is provided to homeless individuals. This initiative helps to keep people safe and off the streets during cold winter nights.

Problem description

The database for WE 24 was difficult to manage. In combination with Salesforce, Excel sheets and Google Docs were used to track, store, and communicate the data with other staff members, which was found to be quite difficult, repetitive, and time consuming for staff, participants and volunteers to use for funding and reporting purposes.

The solution

The students developed an a Salesforce application enabling WE 24 Safe Space staff to collect, report, and track daily activities, attendance, supplies, food served, and other activities performed during the program. In addition, users can generate incident reports and indicate the people involved in the incident. Administrators can run monthly, quarterly, and yearly reports as needed.

What our students are saying

“As a Scrum Master of our team, I learned a lot from this project and most importantly it created a sense of responsibility in me towards the project completion. This project helped me to practice Agile methodologies that were taught in the academic terms. I scheduled meetings and prepared agendas for them. I learned to gather requirements and converting them into user stories. I performed all the Scrum ceremonies such daily stand up meetings, Sprint planning meeting, Sprint review meeting and Sprint retrospective meeting. One of the major learning outcomes was that I realized that it’s all about getting things done on the planned schedule.” – Jaskaran Singh

“As a developer I learned from this project a new language called Apex which uses syntax similar to Java. I participated in all the Scrum Ceremonies and practiced Agile methodology for the completion of this project. I also learned some Salesforce database queries that uses SQL keywords. I learned create features and validations rules using Process Builder. I learned to add fields and forms as required by the clients. I learned to get reports on data entered into the Salesforce System and created templates for the WE 24 Staff.” – Adrian Mapue

Technologies used

• G-Suite
• Bizagi
• Salesforce
• Lightshot

Contact Edit screen