C.R.E.W - Restrictions broadcaster

Live Mashup Preview
Subscription form
Update guidelines

Inspiration

As the Nobel prize winning Biologist Joshua Lederber said, - The single biggest threat to mans continued dominance on this planet is the virus. Last year we were visited by an unknown contagion that had the entire world succumb to its power.

We learned that not only are we vulnerable, but we are hopelessly & hilariously outgunned. “I am asking what are you prepared to do?” ~ Nick Fury.

As members of the IT community, me and my team have formed the Contagion Response Enablement Workflow (C.R.E.W) to contribute our bit in strengthening the community. We will demo the Restrictions Broadcaster application under C.R.E.W as part of this project. In the current scenario, the word Restrictions has become synonymous with our daily lives where people are always searching for the “current” restrictions in their area. I am sure most of you can relate to the fact that with the changing conditions, we google or search through different websites to ensure we know the level of restriction implemented today when we step out of the house.

The foundation of having a strong defense is to make the people aware of the changing circumstances as soon as possible.

What it does

With our Restrictions Broadcaster application, we have tried to resolve this common issue faced by people in today’s world and make everyone’s lives simpler. Subscription: We have leveraged pure OOTB features to provide a free subscription form to the user available via Govt Services webpage via which they can be notified about updates to their choice of service real-time. There is no registration required. Anyone can go to the webpage, provide their email address, select the state and the categories they want to subscribe. For MLP version , we have considered only one state for the use case. We have considered the people who are not well versed in English and face difficulties in understanding the guidelines. We have provided a language option where they can choose which language to receive the notifications in. In the MLP version we have shown only 4 languages where we imported the Language pack from Pega community and have used only the OOTB words available. Further translation can be done on top of that using the Language Translation Wizard which we could have the MLP 2.0 An acknowledgement email gets triggered to the subscriber confirming of successful subscription. As none of the words are available OOTB language pack, the ack email goes out in English.

Restrictions Broadcast portal- This follows a Microjourney with two personas, data and web channel.

Our next persona is a Gov CRT Team member and is responsible updating the restriction guidelines on our portal as soon he receives the list of updates from the Govt’s Covid Management team. He selects the categories which have had any updates and capture the new guidelines in the portal. He then submits the case for review to his manager.

Our next persona - Mr Dave Wills. He work as a Team Manager of the Vic Gov CRT team. He is responsible for reviewing the restriction guidelines that come in through the Restrictions broadcaster portal and approve or reject so that he lets only the correct information be passed on to the public

As soon as the updates are approved, email notification gets triggered to all the subscribers whose selection of services have had the restrictions modified in the current case by the CRT team. It is a single email per subscriber consolidating all the changes in the one email. We see the two words "Category" and "Yes" and "No" are available OOTB in language pack and have been translated in the email.

How we built it

We have used Pega v8.5.3 We have captured our user stories in Agile Workbench with Must have and Future as priorities. We have used App Studio to- -Create the case and microjourneys for Update Guidelines case type, -Create mashup channel We have used OOTB Pega Language pack to translate email correspondence to the chosen language.

Challenges we ran into

we encountered issues while creating Mashup channel in V8.5.3 than V8.2. We had to use workaround to demo the live version of Mashup. There was a bit of research involved in using the language pack although it was easily available in the community. It was a challenge to come up with as easy to use application which could bring both public and Govt together using IT.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We achieved all our features planned for MLP1.0 within the tight timelines with a working demo which can be easily scaled and extended to include larger number of areas and services. This application is very easy to use for the common man/businesses and Govt and brings both together with minimal effort.

What we learned

We learnt new OOTB capabilities by the hands-on implementation which was straightforward via the App Studio and didnt have to use any customisation in the MLP version. We also learnt the impacts a small scale application can have with the right solution.

What's next for C.R.E.W - Restrictions broadcaster

We will work towards enhancing our application to MLP2.0 with enhancements such as - -Addition of new categories based on each state -Provision of Covid hotspots as a category which can be sent in a map view -Enabling SMS notifications -Using Language translation Wizard to translate all the content of correspondences -Addition of more languages on the subscription form