client case study

executive development international

One of the most technically challenging systems we've ever programmed has been the 360 Online project for Executive Development International (EDI).

The 360 Online system is an online personnel profiling system that works entirely over the web. It allows EDI to provide a near-automated profiling solution and saves enormous amounts of time over the previous manual based system.

In a nutshell, The 360 Online system is first given a list of Participants, who are individual employees to be profiled within a company (usually managers or team leaders). The system then emails all these Participants and asks them to log in and give details of various colleagues (known as Respondents) they wish to take part in the survey. They also give their relation to the Participant, be they their manager, a subordinate, a customer, or friend etc.

Each of these Respondents are then automatically emailed a unique login and an invitation to provide information about their colleague. When they login, they are presented with a detailed questionnaire.

This questionnaire is generated online by EDI staff from a large pool of predefined multiple choice questions. Questions can be arranged in many different ways, re-ordered, and various options given (such as comments etc).

Part of a sample online questionnaire

Respondents then complete this questionnaire (over time if they wish - they can save and come back to it) and all answers are then recorded in the database.

EDI staff can monitor who's completing the questionnaires and who are not (and chase accordingly). When a satisfactory number of Respondents have completed the data, it is then sent to a qualified profile writer to analyse the collated data and compile a number of personal recommendations based on general opinion in relation to the Participant.

These recommendations are taken online (even spell-checked!) through the same 360 Online engine and brought back into the database.

All that's left to do now for EDI staff is ask the system to generate an online report, and can specify exactly what should be included in the report and even brand it with corporate colours and logos.

Some sample exported graphics from the report

The online report then automatically generates many pages of detailed graphs, recommendations, summaries, strengths and weaknesses etc in relation to that Participant. Generation is fully automated and the data can be exported to a PDF file or imported into Excel/Word etc if needs be.

The 360 Online system is no small feat of software engineering and perfectly demonstrates the power of the web for use with automated business systems. The system has taken several years to develop and has revolutionised personnel profiling for the company client base. It is most probably the most sophisticated system of it's type ever developed and proves that large software projects don't always need to be programmed by large software houses.