Enterprise system for a nursing agency
Five and a half years on a compliance-sensitive system covering booking candidates onto shifts through to paying them.
Context
An enterprise system for a UK nursing agency, covering the full cycle: booking candidates onto shifts, through scheduling, through to paying them.
A suite of products rather than one application, used daily by non-technical staff whose work the system either supported or obstructed.
Constraints
A compliance-sensitive domain with statutory pay and scheduling rules. Getting either wrong has real consequences — for the agency, and for someone’s pay packet.
Rules of that kind are not requirements you implement once. They change outside your control, and the system has to be shaped so that a change to a rule is a change in one place.
What I built
Backend functionality across a range of products in the agency’s suite.
Database administration and web server maintenance — the operational side as well as the development side.
Business reporting for non-technical users, so that answering a question about the business did not require an engineer.
Decisions and trade-offs
Requirements came directly from end users, and I translated them into functional specifications working alongside the architect and product owner. The value in that was in going back to the person who asked: what a user requests and what a user needs are frequently different, and the difference only surfaces in conversation.
Outcome
Five and a half years on the system.
It was also my first experience leading other developers — specifying and breaking down work for two engineers, which is a different skill from doing the work and one I was not immediately good at.