Master Builders Association of Victoria (MBAV) is constantly raising the standard within the building industry. In 2016, to further this goal, MBAV sought to digitally transform their business – a transformation that would impact every department, relationships with members, and industry engagement as a whole. With Newpath as MBAV’s chosen Microsoft Dynamics 365 partner agency, the reconstruction of MBAV’s digital presence and digital systems began.
Ten years prior, MBAV had commissioned an astute developer to build an all-in-one Content Management System and ERP. While this highly capable platform was tailored to every process, it became costly to change if the business made strategic shifts in policy or process. The organisation also recognised that their entire operational platform faced key-man risk – lowering this risk would be key to the association’s continuing development and growth as an essential figure in Victoria’s flourishing and dynamic building industry.
Newpath Web was tasked with the process of rebuilding this platform using best-of-breed tools that would suit each of their seven major departments (each of which operating like a separate business). Functions such as membership applications and management, website content management, marketing automation, e-commerce, and a range of significant systems integrations would need to be designed and built from-the-ground-up. As such, it was seen as a high-priority venture with many perceived risks.
Assisting with the initial technology selection, Newpath took up the project to not only design and develop the new Drupal 8 website but also develop the Microsoft Dynamics 365 ERP component. As their previous platform was a proprietary all-in-one website and ERP, the integration between the website and Dynamics 365 would need to be tightly integrated to enhance member experiences while also ensuring customer service processes were not disrupted.
From a design perspective, MBAV had also taken on a rebranding process. This posed a range of project control challenges that would need to be met with tight project governance and a strong design methodology.
Our process would need to be agile in every sense to effectively tie research, technical scoping, design, development, systems integration, and quality assurance together into a high quality delivery.
Catering to 20k members and +1mil users per year, MBAV’s web presence and business processes would need to be well-understood in order to deliver high quality member experiences.
We built out a tailored User Experience program that would see us research the needs of every business unit, user audiences (including builder members, trainees, apprentices, and government representatives), allowing us to develop informed user personas and journeys.
This highly effective methodology and toolkit created for this large-scale 24-month project is still used by our team today.
To cater to the complex project delivery requirements and tight schedule, once our discovery research phase was complete we switched into an agile process to run information architecture, wireframing, content management, and UI component design in parallel. Due to the scale of the build, we were able to achieve this by segmenting the project into modules (or ‘epics’). The ‘Agifall’ approach allowed us to initially focus on key business and member requirements prior to setting various departments to work in a highly coordinated manner.
Within 6 months, we had designed the website prototypes and development was well on its way. The Agilfall approach also allowed us to retrofit the newly established brand, undertaken in parallel by their branding agency partner, without significantly impacting design or development processes.
Similarly, Microsoft Dynamics 365 integration was able to take place once our Drupal 8 CMS core had reached a point of maturity. Our Business Analysts effectively stewarded the process of mapping every organisational procedure and business rule while our development team built the RESTful API – a significant and highly capable web service – to match every need.
The highly capable Drupal website and Microsoft Dynamics 365 platforms were successfully released in 2018. Due a strong design-led process, many innovations were introduced to the business and its loyal members, including:
Newpath web maintains a strong relationship with Master Builders and is now embarking on a new innovative project in collaboration with WorkSafe Victoria. This project combines a range of cutting-edge automation tools such as Nintex which tightly integrates with the Microsoft ecosystem. The first-of-its-kind platform is set to change the building industry in Victoria for years to come.
