USC Keck School of Medicine "Find a Provider" Search Flow

Tech Holding rebuilds the USC Keck Medicine 'Find a Provider' search flow and provider data API layer.

The USC Keck PMD project was a web and mobile initiative focused on redesigning and rebuilding the Keck Medicine “Find a Provider” website flow, which patients use to search for the right healthcare provider to serve their medical needs. USC’s application development team hired Tech Holding to build the front-end application and integrate their data from a new API provider.

Challenges

USC Keck’s application development team was switching API providers and needed help managing the new API calls on their desktop and mobile sites for their “Find a Provider” search flow.
In parallel, they wanted to use the migration as an opportunity to update their “Find a Provider” flow with new UX and features that would put them on par with competing medical schools and industry standards.
The USC application development team required a development methodology to help manage the scale and dependencies of this project, which was a unique and complex undertaking for the organization.
Their contract with their old API provider had a fixed expiration date, and it was critical that both the API migration and website updates were completed before then.

Solution

Tech Holding embedded a project manager, product manager, and development team with USC Keck engineers to drive the planning and execution of this project.
Project management created a project plan to highlight the integration points between API migration milestones and bring visibility to all development feature deliverables.
Project management curated and documented a Kanban methodology for use with the client to encourage regular staging deployments, demos, and communication between our developers and the USC Keck engineers.
Tech Holding drove the creation, review, and sign-off of the product roadmap and stories that would constitute all of the work we need to do to deliver the MVP.
Project management monitored and executed all project cadences, milestone achievements, and final product handover with weekly status reports and process documentation to keep all stakeholders informed.

Benefits

Integrating Tech Holding and USC Keck engineers allowed closer collaboration and ongoing project visibility.
Because the client worked within our project team, they were able to more easily adopt our best practices for project management and delivery processes.
This close collaboration and our emphasis on documentation meant that our best practices were readily accessible to and referenced by other departments at USC Keck, allowing them to scale our processes to other departments and grow their influence at the school.

Our Approach

Tech Holding utilized a project inception process that included a series of discovery sessions and interviews with USC Keck stakeholders to document their requirements for this project and narrow down the MVP scope that we would be able to deliver within our limited time frame.

Our product group took this scope and broke it down into epics and stories that we would use to track progress in Azure DevOps, the client’s preferred project management tool. Additionally, our development team estimated these stories, outlined the infrastructure and designed the architecture we would need to support their delivery, and operationalized the CI/CD workflow that would eventually be handed over to the client and their engineers.

Project management took these discovery artifacts and built a project plan detailing the feature deliverables, milestones, and dependencies for the team to reference. In Azure DevOps, a Kanban workflow was set up, and tickets reflecting the project plan deliverables were added for the team to work on during project execution. Our team reported weekly on the velocity of the work items that were completed, and these were cross-referenced with the project plan timelines. The team would then review any risks, adjusted scope, and priority changes that would occasionally come up through this analysis and communicate it to the client via a weekly executive status review.

Finally, we held bi-weekly demos with USC Keck stakeholders to showcase our development progress and gather feedback from the larger organization. We also held retrospectives to review the previous two weeks of work and identify improvements to our process.

Outcomes

Due to Tech Holding’s efforts to keep USC Keck closely involved and appraised at all phases of the project, the teams were constantly in sync regarding progress and could swarm to address any risks and blockers quickly. Between in-depth knowledge transfer sessions and documentation, Tech Holding seamlessly transitioned ownership of the application and underlying infrastructure over to USC Keck following production launch.

Tech Holding’s precise and proactive project management approach enabled us to complete our side of the development work two weeks ahead of schedule, providing us a buffer to support USC Keck in the final stages of their API transition and swarm lower priority bugs to make the final product as clean as possible.

During launch day, Tech Holding organized a war room to coordinate launch activities and support steps to ensure error-free production deployment. Following launch, we maintained a small team on standby for 30 days to address any post-launch issues and answer any follow-up questions from the client.

Ultimately, the project was a huge success, and USC Keck has adopted our processes and approach to other departments and future application development projects within their organization.