At Foothold we maintain a Project Pipeline that keeps a steady stream of new features, updates and enhancements going to AWARDS each month. This Project Pipeline represents our annual vision and goals for AWARDS, taking into account the priorities of our clients, regulators, and Foothold’s long-term vision. From this 30,000-foot view, we ensure that AWARDS will do more things, for more people, more efficiently.
However, this approach alone doesn’t reflect the level of involvement that we have with our clients. On a daily basis through channels such as the Foothold Help Desk, we get an acute idea of how our clients are using AWARDS and how we can improve their experience.
To be responsive to the feedback we get, we often release smaller updates, which we refer to as “quick wins.” To us, a “quick win” represents a small, smart change that we’re able to formulate, develop, and deploy in a condensed period of time. While small, these changes often have a big impact—whether it’s changing the sorting capability of a report, adding a field to a contact form, or restructuring a settings page for easier use.
Here are some examples of “quick wins” that we’ve released in the past few months:
Demographics Report Sorting: To make it easier to find fields on our major cross-area report, the Demographics Report, we created sections that group field options from where they originate in AWARDS.
Report Sorting Consistency: Clients have asked for all of our reports to sort by Last Name, First Name, so we worked through every report in AWARDS to make sure they were working this way.
Billing Dashboard: To bridge data between consumer records and important information tied to billing actions, we created a dashboard accessible from several areas in AWARDS.
Whether considered a massive overhaul or tiny tweak, the common thread with all these changes is that they will improve AWARDS for not only the client that initiated the change, but for all AWARDS users, who receive the update free of charge. Some recent feedback confirmed the impact of an update: “Mary and I would like to say bravo to the change that was made in HMIS. It is so much easier to find a person when searching now.” Sometimes it’s the little things that count!