‍Discovery Phase and development of a web-based application for Spectrum

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Business challenge:

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Data analytics based on specific criteria has always been challenging for marketing companies, including Spectrum. At one point, their data storage accumulated such vast information that it was challenging to derive meaningful insights from it within a reasonable timeframe. However, more than data is needed; it is more important to use that accumulated data. Spectrum asked VITech to help with this problem.

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Project description

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Stage 1: Investigation

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The first stage of our Discovery Phase consisted of the following components:

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• Stakeholders analysis to identify external and internal stakeholders for the future project
• Interviews to define hypotheses
• Validation of hypotheses using the import effort matrix technique, which allows prioritization of hypotheses according to their importance and impact on the product
• Development of a clickable interface
• Usability testing to validate archived results by using a particular interface

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The result of the first phase of the discovery was a validated list of hypotheses and a validated user interface. It addressed the primary client's needs. However, we've identified several additional analytics-related issues that a web-based application needs to consider.

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During the first phase, the following specialists were involved:

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• Project manager, who was responsible for managing the communication channels between Spectrum and VITech
• The user experience designer, who developed the user interface, conducted interviews and workshops for testing the clickable prototype
• A business analyst who was engaged in the defining, validation, and prioritization of hypotheses
• A software architect who was responsible for developing a technological vision for this product

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Stage 2: Creating a web-based application

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The new, enhanced web-based platform was explicitly designed by the VITech team to provide quick answers to complex questions like:

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• How do we communicate to the client that a specific PR campaign was effective and addressed the client's needs?
• How do we properly evaluate the campaign's effectiveness, using ML algorithms to analyze standard metrics such as impressions, click-through rate, cost per click, and others?
• How can we react more quickly by improving the negative KPIs on specific metrics?

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To achieve this result, VITech built a web-based application with a clickable interface. At this stage, the front-end and back-end developers joined the team. Our SDLC allowed us to significantly reduce the development time at this stage. Instead of the usual 2 or 3 weeks, the initial development period took only 6 hours.

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As the result of the second phase of the discovery, the technical view of the project was developed, which includes:

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• Developing software architecture design for the next 3-5 years
• Creating a proof of concept scenario which has to demonstrate the effectiveness of ML for solving client's needs

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Stage 3: Project management

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The third phase of the discovery concentrated on project management issues. The following artefacts were developed:

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• The software architecture design description
• The software proof of concept document
• The work breakdown structure
• The team composition
• The road map

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The resulting document of the final stage of the Discovery Phase was a discovery report consisting of the following parts:

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• Abstract (market analysis)
• Introduction (investigation to discover clients' needs)
• Methods (for example, we used an import effort matrix to validate hypotheses)
• Results (the software architecture design description, the software proof of concept document, the work breakdown structure, the team composition, the road map, the list of validated hypotheses, the web-based application)
• Conclusion (technical recommendations about functional or unuseful hypotheses, pros, and cons of each used methodology)

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Results

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VITech has developed next-generation ML software that provides faster and more reliable data analysis to accelerate marketing decision-making. It has integration capabilities that can be expanded into other businesses.

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The key advantages that VITech designed into the system architecture include:

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• User-friendly functionality
• Supporting complex queries and requesting data of different types/levels
• Supporting the custom combinations of rules and date ranges
• Categorizing the population stratification by specific criteria
• Faster and more reliable data analysis of the client's database
• Facilitating and accelerating decision-making in the area of marketing

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It would be an essential step forward towards market leadership in population analysis. It would allow a client to create requests for information, proposals, and quotations according to specific needs.

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The final list of artefacts received by the client includes:

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• List of all posited invalidated hypotheses
• The prioritized list of validated hypotheses (validation board)
• Clickable mockups
• High-level software architecture design document
• Proof of Concept
• Web app (codebase)
• Proof of Concept software requirements specifications
• Demo guide
• Work breakdown structure and team composition document
• Discovery report

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Why VITech?

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• By that moment, VITech had already developed Science Puls, a software capable of analyzing how frequently specific terms and expressions are used in the scientific literature over some time. It helped us accumulate valuable experience working with the company's complex requests in the database.
• We started thinking about the new software and working towards a Big Data-based calculation approach for healthcare years before it became a recognized industry need.