Dynamic Monitoring and Evaluation Platform for an NGO

Made our vision come to life

Introduction

Christian Commission for Development in Bangladesh (CCDB) is a not for profit organization, focusing on people’s needs and aspirations through projects and programs, addressing emergency needs, through relief, rehabilitation and reconstruction followed by development programs, focusing on human resource development toward self-reliance, collective growth and distributive justice for the promotion of good governance and peace through education, health, income generation through community managed organizations. Starting from 1973 CCDB has been involved with numerous projects throughout Bangladesh.

At any given time CCDB has multiple projects at different locations with thousands of permanent and temporary staff and consultants working those projects.

For more information please visit: ccdbbd.org

Challenge

CCDB needed a software solution for managing their projects, keeping track of data, monitoring and evaluating project status and outcome and managing the assets, finance and human resource for those projects. With such a large number of resources working on very different projects the solution platform need to bring in a unified and standardized process for managing the projects. There was also a need for data gathering and survey tools that would enable field level staff to input data into the system which then can go through various levels of checks and be use for various statistical analysis and baseline studies.

The projects had many stakeholders all of whom needed access to the software at different levels of access levels. Stakeholders included donors who fund the programs, external consultants, management staff at CCDB, permanent and temporary staff at the field level, etc.

There was a concern about the lack of Internet speed at some of the training locations and the relative lack of computer skills of the users.

Solutions

Given the uniqueness of the software platform and the user base, we decided to approach the challenge by concentrating on usability first. Our design and product team met with the CCDB team, and other would-be users to understand the challenges and based on that created wireframes and mock-ups of the screens. These were then tested for usability and fine-tuned. One major goal in the design process was to keep the interfaces lightweight to cover the low internet bandwidth challenge.

The finalized mock-ups formed the specifications for the software development process. A Microsoft .NET based web application was built with an Angular front-end. Given the large volume of data, we chose MS SQL server as the database.

We also developed an Android application that was to be used as the survey and data gathering tool on Android based Tabs that the field level staff would use.

To address the challenges of potential users without computer skills, we produced detailed video tutorials for the common tasks and that enabled such users to follow the steps one by one to get the jobs done. This reduced the need for hands on training to such users.

Benefits

The software platform is now deployed and being used by CCDB to track, monitor and evaluate all its projects. All paper based forms, surveys and other documents have been replaced with this digital platform. More than 250 Android tab devices are used along with the Android application to gather data that is then fed into the software. The detailed access control features lets CCDB give granular control to various parts of the software to its users based on project and level of authority.

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