The problem
Carter Brown Experts were founded in 2001 and are the UK’s leading provider of professional psychologist, psychiatrist, social worker and paediatrician report writers for legal entities, local authorities, panels, and organisations. With a large volume of work, it is essential for Carter Brown Experts to accurately record customer enquiries and track cases, the tasks required to generate the reports, and the agents assigned to them. Their existing custom application that had worked well for them up to that point, but whose developer was retiring, required some additional functionality and future support. A decision was taken to use the opportunity to redevelop the application using modern cloud technologies. This would free the company from the headache of a desktop application deployment and updates across a hybrid office and work-from-home staff base as well as increase the number of developers who can support the application, and it would also position the application to take full advantage of new and upcoming technologies.
- Carter Brown Experts founded in 2001 are the UK’s largest multidisciplinary provider of expert assessments, reporting to local authorities, within criminal law, on asylum and immigration matters, and to Mental Health Tribunals
- Carter Brown Experts mission is to provide robust evidence-based quality reports, in a convenient manner for their customers in a transparent fashion.
- Carter Brown Experts goal was to replace an existing Windows desktop application with a flexible, modern web application.
- The office sort greater automation and reliability, lower maintenance, increased scope for future developments, and continued support for their line-of-business application.
Our approach
We held extensive discussions with the original developer, Carter Brown Experts Subject Matter Experts, and Carter Brown Experts senior stakeholders. We stood up replicas of their existing application infrastructure and analysed the existing database and code to understand the current application. We then formulated a project plan which emphasised flexibility and client visibility for every step of the agile project. Project management, infrastructure as code, and source control was conducted using Azure DevOps. Access between Carter Brown Experts, project managers, and developers was encouraged and facilitated by using on-site meetings, Teams, emails, and phones.
Intelligent Decisioning has done a fantastic job with the development of our new Tracker software. The fresh, modern platform and user interface has significantly improved our efficiency, providing us with better insights into our day-to-day operations. This has enabled us to make more informed decisions and achieve better outcomes for our business. Intelligent Decisioning quickly grasped what we were trying to achieve and the teamwork and collaboration throughout the project were exceptional, ensuring that our needs were met every step of the way.
Amy Callaghan, Managing Director of Carter Brown Experts
Our solution
To provide security, flexibility, a robust platform, and because Carter Brown Experts already used Microsoft Azure, we based our solution on the Microsoft development stack and Microsoft Azure.
Our solution offered the following key features:
- Rapid development using multiple developers and testing team working in parallel.
- Rapid deployment of infrastructure and new code across multiple environments to facilitate application lifecycle management.
- Reproduction and enhancement of the original application functionality into an n-tier web application.
- Data security through default and extended Azure SQL backups.
- Integration with Carter Brown’s current IT infrastructure.
- Continuing support and the opportunity for future development using a wealth of Azure resources.
The outcome
We worked with three businesses to deliver a solution that meets our customer’s needs and is robust and low maintenance, requiring very little support. The delivered solution empowers the sales office staff to concentrate on other tasks such as data accuracy while providing them with the information they need to monitor the automated processes. This has resulted in reduced errors in input data, less chance of delayed orders, whilst maintaining the staff’s overall control of the jobs.
