A set of siloed desktop apps updated once a year — rebuilt as one centralized web platform shipping every two weeks.
The existing platform for administering social work licensing exams was split across multiple standalone desktop applications, with updates pushed just once a year — a pace that made even small fixes wait months to reach the people who needed them.
There was no path for incremental fixes — every change, however small, got bundled into one big release roughly once a year. Bugs and issues that surfaced in between just sat there, unresolved, for however long it took the next annual update to come around.
Before consolidating anything, the separate applications needed to be understood on their own terms — what each one did, who used it, and where the real overlap and gaps were.
Five separate desktop applications made up the existing system. Understanding them meant talking to stakeholders within each line of business, plus the staff who worked inside these tools every day — the people who felt every one of the gaps between them firsthand.
Centralizing the system wasn't only an architecture decision — it meant scoping and prioritizing features around an agile, two-week release cycle instead of a single yearly push, which changed how work got planned from the start.
A prioritization exercise filtered the sprawl down to what actually mattered most, and from there each task got groomed with the dev team before it earned a place in the backlog — keeping the two-week cadence realistic instead of aspirational.
The new platform replaced the siloed desktop tools entirely with a single web application — one system for the client to maintain, one place for examiners and administrators to go instead of several.
[Add specifics: key screens or flows you designed, decisions that mattered most to stakeholders.]
Every release went through UAT before it shipped, and whatever issues surfaced got triaged right after — a rhythm that repeated every two weeks, instead of once a year.
[Add a number here if you have one — time saved per release, error reduction, adoption across examiners/administrators.]