Sector(s)
Overview
This case study examines how a rapid-development approach and an agile methodology helped Northern Health, a Canadian healthcare provider, launch a new recruitment website on a tight deadline.
The project's goal was to address critical staffing shortages in rural areas of northern British Columbia by attracting qualified healthcare candidates. The website was developed by Acro Commerce using Drupal, a flexible and secure open-source platform favoured by government and healthcare organizations.
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The Challenge
Northern Health provides healthcare services to over 80,000 people across nearly 600,000 square kilometres, and a key challenge for the organization is filling vacant positions in its vast service area.
They needed a modern, user-friendly website to showcase the benefits of working in the region and to highlight job openings. This was part of a larger, province-wide recruiting campaign, and the Human Resources department was under pressure to fill these critical roles quickly.
The project had a very ambitious timeline of just 12 weeks from ideation to launch, a feat that is difficult to achieve while meeting all stakeholder needs.
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The Solution: A New Approach to Development
To meet the strict deadline and budget constraints, Acro Commerce worked with Northern Health to build the site using an accelerated development model.
Unlike the traditional waterfall method, where each stage is completed sequentially, the accelerated approach involves multiple teams — such as front-end, back-end, and design — working on different fronts simultaneously to dramatically shorten the time to launch.
The project leveraged a proven, iterative, and repeatable process, powered by an Agile-backed project management approach. The teams ran a discovery and strategy phase to establish the necessary information architecture while the software teams began the Drupal build concurrently.
Key features of the new website include:
- Engaging testimonials from employees
- Spotlights on different communities in the region
- An integrated career center to list job openings
- Frequently asked questions and a site search function
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The Results
By adopting the accelerated development path and leveraging Drupal, Acro Commerce successfully launched the new GoHealth BC website in less than three months. This enabled Northern Health to quickly gain a valuable recruitment tool to address its staffing challenges.
This case study demonstrates the effectiveness of a modern, agile approach to web development in a time-sensitive environment. By choosing a flexible, open-source platform like Drupal and an accelerated development model, Northern Health was able to:
- Achieve rapid time-to-value for a working recruitment tool
- Deliver a modern user experience with a focus on attracting qualified candidates
- Benefit from an agile, iterative, and repeatable process that can handle multiple ongoing projects
Are you facing similar challenges in your organization?
We specialize in helping B2B and enterprise clients solve complex digital problems with efficient, high-impact solutions.
Contact us today to learn more about our accelerated development process.
Back to topAbout the project
Solution
Adopting a proven iterative and repeatable process that shortens time-to-launch.
The GoHealth BC site is a complete-from-scratch build for Northern Health, and it is a brilliant opportunity to show off Acro Commerce’s accelerated development model to its full potential.
To best use everyone’s resources, we ran a discovery & strategy phase, delivering the necessary information architecture artifacts. At the same time, our front-end and back-end software teams began working on the Drupal build.
Traditional vs. Accelerated Development
Traditional development, also known as waterfall development, involves each stage occurring consecutively. Using this process, the first version of a website takes months and months longer.
When adopting an accelerated development path, work is done on multiple fronts simultaneously, dramatically shortening the time it takes to deliver a website.
Using Agile-backed project management and development processes, we met Northern Health’s deadline and launched their brand new site in under three months.
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Site Capabilities
Testimonials | FAQ | Site Search | Community Pages | Job Postings
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Building the future of healthcare quickly & efficiently
Northern Health required a web development agency to meet the challenge of creating a new, modern website within a very tight timeframe to enhance recruitment and fill critical job openings in British Columbia.
- Accelerated time-to-value for a working recruitment tool.
- Ability to handle multiple ongoing projects at once.
- Agile, iterative and repeatable processes.
Meet with our team today if these goals align with your website development needs.
Back to topWhy Drupal was chosen
Government, University and Health Care organizations continually choose Drupal for their websites. But why?
- Economical — While Drupal sites aren’t free to build, costs are easier to manage without the licence fees associated with SaaS platforms. Savings are compounded when applied across dozens, if not hundreds, of departments or sub-sites.
- Performant — Drupal significantly outperforms other open-source platforms such as WordPress. Drupal was created to be highly efficient and capable of managing heavy traffic loads, practically eliminating downtime.
- Secure — Drupal has thousands of contributors working behind the scenes to bolster the platform’s defences. Drupal beats SaaS regarding complex security requirements such as PCI compliance and handling of sensitive data.
- Flexible — Drupal’s open-source development community contributes to an expansive library of plug-and-play-ready modules (nearly 50,000 as of mid-February 2023), meaning there’s not much that Drupal can’t do.
