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Focus Risk management platform
- Netherlands Country
- Global Industry
- Risk management platform Type
Focus is a risk management platform that helps municipalities reduce the risk of incidents in the city that often cause significant damage.
It was created by Silo35 who work in Amsterdam, an old city with lots of beautiful wooden houses that require constant maintenance and monitoring. To provide the municipality with a tool for quick problem identification and decision making, Silo35 built a scoring model, which allows the stakeholders to map the largest risks, make it clear who is working on what, and understand what object requires the most attention.
The platform is focused on several industries and has a proven success record operating there:
- security: helps to identify risks and prioritise actions;
- housing: uncover causes of housing threats and issues;
- logistics: risk management for logistics;
- environment and infrastructure: fire safety, CO emissions, industrial impact on the environment, etc.
The main task was to develop several distinctive features of a genuinely functional platform:
- comprehensive dashboard;
- user profile management and roles;
- organisation management;
- task assignment and tracking;
- analytics visualisation;
- search by map (area) and filters;
- grouping, sorting, and categorisation opportunities;
- surveying and reporting, etc.
We must admit that before we started working together, the client had already had a pretty clear idea of what they would like to achieve and how. Our job was to dig out the little nuances, detect any grey areas and unanswered questions, so we started with the business analysis.
The key people who helped our business analyst with the requirements were Jop, CEO of Silo35, Jesse, product manager and Maaike, designer. We made sure that whatever that was designed was also feasible and made sense, and if not — adequately adjusted.
Discovery phase — another term for business analysis — lasted roughly a month and was full of frequent calls where the business analyst asked questions. We covered broad concepts like defining main roles and their responsibilities as well as documented tiny details (what happens when we click a particular button? what message is shown after a specific action? etc.).
In the end, we created a functional specification that the development team followed during the implementation stage.
The backend of the Focus platform is built in PHP, while the back-office and the client-facing dashboards use React JS.
One of the alternatives that we initially considered for the back-office was Admin LTE — a free bootstrap template to build all sorts of dashboards. The beauty of Admit LTE is that it comes with tons of elements and styles; however, the client decided to go custom and build a unique back-office, so we went with React.
Why React though?
- Less page reloads
- More interaction in the interface
- Faster performance
We finished the development in about 4 months, splitting the whole process into 2-week sprints. Since we had a details specification and design mockups, there was no need to communicate with the client too often, although we did inform him about the progress on a regular basis. Because we always do 🙂