Equal Opportunities West – Resource Management System

Posted: September 3, 2019

Project Term: Summer 2019

Equal Opportunities West is a Winnipeg-based non-profit organization that provides support services to adults with developmental disabilities, helping them to attain meaningful employment. The organization’s rapid growth in the past five years increased the burden of administering activities involving staff, students, and vehicle assets. Employees were using a paper-based system and board to set activities, track assets and communicate with staff. The system could not keep up with all the activities and associated changes happening simultaneously. A team of students from the ACE Project Space built a comprehensive resource management system to digitize the organization’s current system and improve business processes.

Building a system to effectively schedule resources

The student project team created a resource management system enabling Equal administrators to assign and schedule personnel and assets to activities, built a message board to simplify and track communication throughout the organization, and incorporated tracking of absences, vehicle usage, participants and others. The students learned how to overcome both technical and non-technical challenges, client management skills, as well as how to gather and implement the right requirements.

Deliverables

The students built the following sub-systems for this project:

Absence Management System
Asset Tracking System
Activity Management System
Incident Management System
Human Resource Management System
Student Management System
Message Board

What our students are saying

“I have learned of how to work with people we have never met before, as well as, working with clients and late requirements and working with strict deadlines.” – David Beauchamp

“Quickly knowing what we were all good at and using it to develop our application helped us tremendously. For me it was communicating and learning to work with a team as I am usually working alone. A special thank you to Quy for his front-end skills, David for his overall knowledge of the software, Kanisha for always being attentive and precise with her work and Mateus for organizing the team and keeping this under control. I could not ask for a better team.” – Jules Douglas

“Working within a diverse team and with members who have different ideas gave me an opportunity to learn new ways to solve problems and provided a good team experience.” – Kanisha Patel

“I have learned of how to communicate with my teammates and how to trust them to perform the actions they were responsible to. I also learned how to conduct meetings and how important testing is for the development of an application.” – Mateus Herculano

“I learned to apply agile methodology in the project, which allows us to have deliverables in place to show customers and get constant feedback from customers. I also learned to deal with customers to gather requirements, verify and document requirements, and made sure the application met those requirements.” – Quy Tran

Equal Opportunities West web site: http://www.equalopportunitieswest.com/en/home