Made in Tandem

Company's Introduction: MIRS, or the MEPCOM (Military Entrance Processing Command) Integrated Resource System, is a software system used to track military applicants during their enlistment process. It houses applicants’ aptitude tests, medical exams, pre-enlistment interviews, background checks, and more. Over a three-year period, Tandem’s software consultants engaged with MEPCOM team members to lead a complete re-envisioning of the system.

The Legacy System: Tandem led the development of the front-end user interface, back-end systems, and integrations for MIRS 1.1, which replaced the legacy MIRS system that had been in place for more than 25 years.

The legacy system was extremely inefficient and cumbersome because data processed at a particular facility wasn’t available to any other MEPS location until the overnight syncing process finished.

Moreover, it crashed frequently, and memorizing the many customized keyboard shortcuts made for a steep learning curve. There were efforts to modernize the system over time, but ultimately the system needed an overhaul to achieve the needed level of efficiency, security, and reliability.

User Research & Prototyping: To create an intuitive workflow while processing such a high volume of sensitive information, Tandem’s product design and software engineering teams conducted extensive user research and prototyping before using an Agile development process to build and test the product.

When completing user research, Tandem talked to field advisors from all three departments within MEPS (Military Entrance Processing Stations) located across the U.S.  Tandem used the research findings to create a product that mimicked the field advisors’ workflow and incorporated their feedback to enable them to do their job effectively and efficiently every day.

Building & Testing the Product: Before putting any hands on keys, we gathered and solidified requirements from more than a dozen stakeholders to create comprehensive, end-to-end requests. Many of the services we integrated did not have APIs and had varying degrees of access for testing environments. We gathered all of the information into one place, and by doing so, we helped MEPCOM and its stakeholders learn more about their business logic than ever before.

Training Materials: Tandem developed training materials to facilitate the adoption of MIRS 1.1 in MEPS across the United States. To make the transition painless, we created 20 clear and engaging training videos covering each feature of MIRS 1.1 so that both new and existing employees can familiarize themselves with the application. All the training videos live in a library, so anyone onboarding or who needs pointers has a repository of videos they can visit.

Company's Introduction: San Diego Gas and Electric (SDG&E), a subsidiary of Sempra Energy, is a regulated public utility provider that serves 3.7 million homes and businesses in San Diego and southern Orange county, with their service area spanning 4,100 square miles.

The San Diego area has long been known for its beautiful beaches and mild climate. Unfortunately, wildfires have posed a growing problem throughout the state in recent years. To lower wildfire risk, California utility providers perform Public Safety Power Shutoffs (PSPS). This involves shutting off power lines when meteorology conditions indicate a high chance of accidental fire — which means notifying customers when these shutoffs happen.

The Challenge: After the 2018 fire season, the California Public Utility Commission and Office of Emergency Services imposed new regulations to reduce future fire risk, including more robust guidelines around customer notification and post-event reporting.
At different stages of an event, it was now required to report the number of customers contacted and the percentage of those customers who have confirmed receiving the message.

Ultimately, SDG&E’s manual reporting systems were no longer going to be feasible to meet their community’s needs. They engaged Tandem to extend their existing VESTA emergency notification platform (ENS) by better integrating it with other legacy systems and creating a long-term roadmap for process improvements that enabled the product to flex with regulatory changes.

Motorola Solutions’ VESTA Platform: Motorola Solutions’ VESTA is a mass communication platform that enables companies to send emails, phone calls, and text messages to their customers.

SDG&E’s existing VESTA notification system has been in use for 10+ years. With the imposition of California’s new reporting regulations, it was clear they needed software that could handle all situations and notify a growing number of customers.

SDG&E had their own customer databases, but their VESTA platform wasn’t built to handle the connection to large databases — it could only send messages to 5,000 customers at a time. Moreover, their application needed a standardized, implicit process that was person-agnostic. The notification and reporting protocol lived in one employee’s head, and without proper documentation it made for a tricky, convoluted 37-step process.

In-Depth Research: After conducting a three-day on-site requirements gathering session, the Tandem team built a future-forward roadmap for SDG&E’s VESTA application and notification process. Together, we worked to uncover priorities and create less room for assumptions and human error.

Intuitive User Experience: Tandem used SDG&E’s legacy systems and infrastructure to create a modern solution that empowers their employees to:

• Create and forecast events based on meteorology data
• View and edit details (like filtering, rollup data)
• Send messages via VESTA

Tandem used Motorola’s COBALT design system to create an intuitive user experience. This upgrade minimized confusion and complexity. Employees could now see critical facilities and communities affected by outages at a glance and onboard new employees faster.

Previously, reports took a long time to load, and employees couldn’t do anything else in the dashboard while they loaded. The new user interface design includes asynchronous background updates so employees can do other tasks within the application while they wait for the report, saving them time during their daily use of the application.

With their new and improved dashboard, operators in SDG&E’s Emergency Operations Center can send critical messages to customers via VESTA in just three clicks, reducing the opportunity for human error.

An iceberg is a great analogy for Tandem’s work on this project — above water, it’s three simple clicks for SDG&E employees to send a message to customers, while underwater the software and data architecture are working and integrating seamlessly with their legacy systems.

Outcome: With a new, modernized and customized mass communication platform, SDG&E is now empowered to be a more functional team and efficiently help their customers when minutes matter.

They are more connected and confident that their application can handle all situations. The notification and reporting process is efficient, with the new, intuitive user interface making it easy for the entire team to understand and quickly send out critical messages.

Seamless integrations with existing critical applications also means SDG&E can continue to expand their software, making it flexible enough to fit all of their needs and enable them to stay agile. Most importantly, the refreshed application means SDG&E has been able to adapt quickly to the latest reporting regulations, leading to them facing far fewer fines — in 2022, their closest competitor was charged 417 times the fine amounts. [Source: AP News]

Company's Introduction: Beyond Finance is a financial services company creating customized debt management and consolidation solutions for consumers. Their platform houses a multitude of applications: Salesforce, web and mobile frontend clients, a Salesforce backend database, backend APIs, a payment/escrow processor, and a task runner. This is an ongoing project where Tandem has helped streamline both technical and cultural decision-making through team integration. 

The Challenge: Beyond Finance had been using a legacy platform that heavily depends on Salesforce. As their internal team worked on the project, they realized they needed support to achieve their goals.The Tandem team was brought on to build strong, internal processes that would lay foundations for the team’s long-term success.

Legacy System: 

• The same code was living in different places, making the codebases repetitive and difficult to work with.
• Testing was challenging for both developers and those in QA doing end-to-end testing.
• Significant cognitive overhead was required to design app interfaces, which was arduous for new developers
• Multiple styles and mappings made it difficult to draw the right system and domain boundaries between each microservice.

Team Practices: Beyond Finance self-identified that their team wasn’t functioning the way they wanted to. As their team grew, the day-to-day programming tasks became challenging: how to think about sprints, completing code reviews, pragmatic decision making, pairing, and following agile processes.

Working with consistency and empathy, Tandem developers led the team in iterating on current processes. The Beyond Finance team felt empowered to be part of a cultural transformation that enabled them to meet their goals well into the future. When Tandem rolled off the project, these devs were ready to become successful team leads.

Here’s what we did:

• Refined a working approach centered around de-siloing information and encouraging communication.
• Proposed more frequent pairing to avoid falling into siloed practices.
• Created retro guidelines with a rotating moderator to ensure everyone on the team has a voice.
• Mentored developers interested in leadership roles by building up their technical savvy and providing expertise on creating processes, partnering with stakeholders, and enacting solutions.