About this project
The Hungarian Charity Service of the Order of Malta has been providing support to those in need across more than 210 settlements with over 5000 volunteers since its establishment in Hungary in 1989. According to their mission, they help those in need - homeless people, the elderly, sick, and disabled - regardless of worldview, nationality, or religious affiliation.
The MONK application was developed for administering the Charity Service's volunteers and efficiently organizing charitable events. WRD Labs Zrt. was responsible for implementing the public website accessible to volunteers as well as the Administrative system (AdminTool) that enables volunteer and event management.
During the project, our task was to coordinate requirements, prepare Figma UI designs, and implement/develop the system.
Client
Participants
WRD [IT Solution Provider]
Business value
- Automated volunteer registration, assessment, and onboarding process: The previous volunteer registration process, managed through Excel spreadsheets and emails requiring substantial manual work and coordination, has been replaced with an automated workflow where registration requests with necessary assessment data are sent to the appropriate Regional Volunteer Coordinator.
- Automated charitable event organization and volunteer registration: The existing 5000+ volunteers can select charitable events that interest them and register their participation. These registrations can be approved, rejected, or modified if necessary by administrators with appropriate permissions.
- Well-structured, user-friendly public interfaces: When designing the web interface for volunteers, the primary focus was implementing the best possible usability and transparency. The design focus was on a minimalist, clean aesthetic. As a result of the project, a platform was created where volunteers can easily find relevant events and indicate their intention to participate.
- Backoffice administrative interface to support work: The AdminTool is closely connected to the website, allowing Regional Volunteer Coordinators to manage volunteers and events within their jurisdiction. Additionally, the application can perform all functions available on the public interface, enabling administrator users to provide real assistance to volunteer end-users when needed.
Challenges
- Tight deadline: Due to the project's relatively tight deadline, the web application design, preparation of Figma designs, and the development itself ran in parallel, which meant particularly tight scheduling for certain subtasks.
- Coordination of different business areas' requirements: During implementation, we needed to meet the requirements of 12 different regions. Besides the 7 regions in Hungary, 5 special regions also needed to be managed, such as the Emergency Management area, whose events and administration differ greatly from physical regions.
- Managing various combinations of volunteer and event attributes: Due to the large number of event and volunteer attributes, we needed to prepare for many possible variations. The specification, development, and testing of these cases required great attention to ensure proper functioning in all constellations.
- Managing numerous end-user responses: The continuous involvement of end-users on the business side made the deployment of the completed application easier, but also required greater flexibility in handling continuously emerging new requirements.
settlements with managed events
regions served
volunteers with
system access
Solution
- Regular coordination: We established close cooperation with the client. Even during the design phase, we presented our progress weekly to flexibly handle changes in requirements.
- Robust architecture for synchronization between systems: For integration with existing systems, we chose a REST API solution, actively participating in its design and jointly determining the necessary endpoints with the client's IT colleagues.
- Strong technical project management: For the most efficient progress, on the project management side, besides understanding and handling business requirements, we placed great emphasis on clarifying technical issues. To this end, the WRD project team included not only a technical project manager but also a senior developer whose task was to clarify more critical technical IT questions that required deeper technical knowledge with the client.
- Project phasing: The primary focus was to replace the previous system as soon as possible, so during planning, we aimed to include only truly necessary developments in the scope. To this end, we divided the project into two phases, separating "nice-to-have" requirements from the first phase, which we could handle in a subsequent phase based on the experience from the first phase.
- Close collaboration between UX/UI design and technical implementation: From the early design phase, we involved a dedicated developer who continuously monitored the design process and consulted with the UX/UI designer about feasibility.
Technology
Java
Spring Boot
PostgreSQL
TypeScript
React
Next.js
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