First Consulting team wins Mendix hackathon
A team of consultants from First Consulting has against a host of talented teams won a Mendix Hackthon with an app that allows UK charity Mencap to improve the way how its carers deliver their services.
Mendix is a low-code, high-productivity platform, that enables enterprises to transform how their organisations innovate and compete with applications. First Consulting has been working with Mendix since 2013 and has a strong track record of delivering innovative and highly functional applications for clients across a range of industries.
The work of First Consulting has ranged from business process management or workflow support to the development of customer portals and dashboards with specific user requirements, and the implementation of innovative solutions integrated with new technologies such as Internet of Things (IoT), machine learning or robotic process automation (RPA). The firm’s track record enabled it to achieve Expert Partner status with Mendix in 2017, which is the highest accreditation level that external companies can be appointed to in the partner capability programme.
About Mendix on Tour
Following on from the success of the Mendix World event earlier this year in Rotterdam (the Netherlands), Mendix brought a one-day taster event to London. The day featured talks from industry experts, panel discussions and the Mendix on Tour Hackathon.
For the Hackathon, Mendix partnered with The Royal Mencap Society, a charity that works with people with a learning disability, giving developers the opportunity to improve people’s quality of life. The brief was to design an app for Mencap to help carers track and encourage positive behaviours to improve people's quality of life. At the heart of positive behaviour support is the idea that all behaviour has purpose. It asks people to think about what can make a difference, to reflect on practices to see what is working and what may need to change.
By following a scoped Agile framework and taking a user-centric approach, the First Consulting team was able to appropriately define the application to be produced. The brief was evaluated in detail by the whole team, with a short design thinking session held to empathise, define and ideate. The detailed wireframes produced were then used to define user stories. All work was carried out in line with Agile Scrum principles and with one day of intense development the team were able to create a fully functioning case management application.
‘Art of the possible’
By putting people at the centre of the application and listening closely to the client, the First Consulting team produced a people focussed app to enable carers to create plans, log incidents and monitor KPIs. They also brought in Natural Language Processing to have voice to text functionality in the app to help Mencap staff spend more time helping people and less time completing forms. All of this was recognised by the judging panel, and the First Consulting team was awarded first place.
More information on First Consulting, including projects and jobs, can be found on the First Consulting company profile on Consultancy.uk.
