Case Study - Infocouncil

Managing council agendas and minutes

About Infocouncil:

Infocouncil provides software solutions required to manage the agendas and minutes of the Australian and New Zealand councils. The automated solutions provided by Infocouncil have greatly benefited the 230 councils by removing the drudgery of repetitive manual work. These solutions have been widely accepted by several councils even in metropolitan and regional areas.

Since 2001, Infocouncil has been assisting the report writers, council administrators and several recipients with effective means of the agenda and meeting management. Though, formed in the year 2001, it was purchased by Vela Australia in July 2018 which is a subsidiary of Toronto based Constellation Software Inc. a USD 23-billion plus market cap publicly traded software company.

Features:

It provides automated solutions for: report writing, creating agendas and minutes, distribution of the same and management of actions of meeting outcomes. Reports, Agendas, Minutes and Actions are the four automated types of documents provided by Infocouncil. They do provide complete resources required for the implementation process. Recently, cloud based functionality at par with desktop functionality have also been introduced by Infocouncil.

Challenges:

  • The software knowledge part used to be lost whenever developers left their job from Infocouncil. It used to take around 6 months in explaining and training the new developers so that they can work on the Infocouncil software efficiently.
  • As the number of clients increased gradually, managing the whole technical implementation process was becoming complex and cumbersome.
  • Though the company was growing rapidly, there were frequent lapses occurring at the internal and external operations level. Providing quality customer support was also becoming a tedious task.
  • Due to the popularity of its products, the company was getting unprecedented recognition. Also the rate of receiving the orders got double than earlier creating a queue like situation at the development side. Thus, replying to the queries of customers, waiting in line to receive their esteem order was getting delayed because of the shortage of technical resources.
  • The orders received were twice in number than the handling capability of the development team. As the developers were already busy in completion of the orders, they were unable to do repetitive tasks of development process. As there were no sufficient technical staffs to handle such laborious work, the repetitive tasks were getting delayed, hampering the whole development schedule. Newer customers were requesting for products having latest version only. Because of the increase in the customer base, lot of time was being consumed to carry out the version up-gradation activities. This activity hampered the duration of deliverables.
  • New installations required more time as number of dedicated and skilled experts were less.

How We Helped:

  • By providing technically strong teams at all levels, viz, entry level, middle level and project management level.
  • We also have backup pool of resource for providing unhindered customer support round the clock.
  • We have dedicated teams for doing repetitive and manual work. The best part is that they never show any signs of boredom while handling such drudgery.
  • We require less time in handling version up-gradation activities because of our expertise and availability of skilled teams.
  • We take complete care to ensure that every individual of the dedicated development team completely understands client’s requirement and would be able to deliver the desired results only.
  • With the availability of extra developers with resource backup mechanism, software knowledge is always retained and never lost. Also no extra time is consumed in training and explaining new developers.
  • New installations are done with ease because we have a dedicated team of experts for implementing the software. Because of the availability of dedicated support team we are able to provide fast technical support required to solve the issues faced by the clients.
  • 70% of AstraGalaxy’s developer team is the same since past 5 years. The team of professionals have complete knowledge of the products and can handle every situation with ease.
  • Custom scripting requirements, up-gradation implementation or any changes desired by the councils can be handled with full professionalism by our managed development team.
  • As we follow standard operating procedures, we have a quick response time and handle adverse situations in a professional manner.
  • We have been successful at all levels in easing out Infocouncil’s work pressure.