USAID Success Story - IQVIS Inc.

USAID

A Customized Web System for HR, Finance, and Recruitment Management

Case Study

United States Agency for International Development, GHFP – Global Health Fellows Program
USAID’s Global Health Fellowship Program identifies and supports diverse, technically excellent professionals at all levels to achieve the Agency’s health priorities by contributing meaningfully to identifying and training diverse future global health professionals, and engaging academia to strengthen non-technical competencies that are essential for a successful global health career.

Challenge

GHFP leaders were challenged with updating a custom recruitment, HR and finance system built on USAID requirements by a vendor which went out of business. The stringent and diverse requirements of USAID necessitated a customized solution robust enough to be self-managed and updated.

Solution

Following multiple conversations regarding product requirements, IQVIS engineers and program managers delved into existing custom solutions and leveraged the data and functionality to build an industry-standard solution which served their immediate and long-term needs. The solution also remained in compliance with USAID requirements and was developed around the existing processes. The initial project was a robust and feature-rich recruiting system which was tightly integrated with Finance system with automatic reports generated for USAID.

Result and ROI

The application IQVIS designed and developed helped GHFP staff self-manage the recruitment process for the fellows and interns, flowing information seamlessly between recruitment, Participant management and Finance systems. It followed their existing processes, with extensive reporting functionality, and the easy ability to update content through the web.

Process

We implemented a two-phase roll out, completing the Recruitment and Participant management and Web portals solutions before integrating them with the Finance portal. Executive: IQVIS’s professionalism and helpful and supportive attitude is matched over by their superior competency and breadth of knowledge on all things technical related to the project.

Finance Program Manager: IQVIS leaders took the time to understand in detail what our requirements were and designed a solution which serviced our needs, the first time. I would whole-heartedly recommend the IQVIS team for implementing your complex, intricate solutions which address your short term and long term needs. HR Program Manager: IQVIS patiently walked us through the end-to-end solution and made sure that each of us could manage it on our own, while also providing support for as long as we needed it. They are incredibly competent and patient.

  • Application processing time went from multiple weeks to less than one week
  • Mobile optimized which resulted in better ranking in Google
  • Applied for multiple jobs retained information went from 10 minutes to less than a minute to apply for second job
  • The automated, self-generated reports made it much simpler for GHFP to communicate progress and success to USAID, including access to most recent real-time information for all the hires.
  • Finance team’s monthly reporting time reduced by 1/3
  • The number of staff managing these reports went from 2 full-time to 1 part-time Technology Solutions Selected
  • Following multiple brainstorming and analysis sessions with all GHFP stakeholders, we opted for an Agile-like development methodology with relatively longer sprint cycles.
  • We selected Java as a standard language and used Spring/Hibernate as the base framework for developing the application.
  • Drupal was selected as the CMS for website and portals.
  • Single Sign On was achieved using Central Authentication Server (CAS)
  • We worked closely with IT department and all other departments to develop and get the flows approved through User Acceptance Testing (UAT)