Pro bono project for Mieli Ry
SOLUTION DELIVERY + TRAINING
In March 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic hit Finland. Travel arrangements, physical meetings and plenty of planned office work was suddenly put on hold and postponed beyond the summer vacation season. In many companies, this led to a temporary shortage of meaningful work assignments.
At Codemate, we thought long and hard about how to utilize this downtime by doing something beneficial and helpful in these volatile and unprecedented times.
Problem definition: demand imbalance
We got in contact with Mieli Suomen Mielenterveys ry (MIELI), a non-profit organization for the improvement of mental health in Finland, via one of our employees. COVID had caused them long queues for first contact customer appointments in densely populated regions, while some locations had free capacity.
MIELI had previously piloted an online appointment reservation system in their Joensuu crisis centre. Now, MIELI needed assistance in launching a similar system nationwide. A national electronic appointment reservation system would help in dealing with regional demand peaks for MIELI services by being able to schedule future appointments from regions with long queues to other crisis centres. It would therefore be possible to handle more clients with the same amount of crisis workers.
Solving the problem without reinventing the wheel
We kicked off the project by organizing remote workshops with MIELI where we discussed both project scope and the needs of the MIELI central organization. Then, we conducted user interviews to understand how the system piloted in Joensuu suits the practical needs of crisis workers. We also reflected on how the pilot system meets the needs of MIELI central organization.
Based on our findings and analysis, we recommended that instead of developing a completely new custom system from scratch, it would be better for MIELI to expand their Microsoft 365 Bookings system piloted in Joensuu nationwide. One key factor to consider was that MIELI needs to be able to operate the new system independently after this project ends.
As a part of the project, we will hold end user training sessions for two MIELI crisis centres. After these training sessions, MIELI will be able to launch the system independently in the rest of their crisis centres. We have created clear instructions in Finnish for both MIELI admin users and end users, as well as training videos with on-screen instructions.
Corona situation forced us to transition the crisis help service into remote mode really fast. It was quite a leap, since digital skills were not the strongest asset for many of our employees, who are social and health professionals. Fortunately, our crisis centre in Eastern Finland had already piloted video calls for crisis work.
In this situation, we got contacted by Codemate, explaining that they would be willing to help us pro bono in developing an online booking system for crisis appointments. We got really excited since some of the crisis centres get long queues also during the normal times. A unified online booking system nation-wide could enable us in helping customers wherever we had free capacity, ensuring that nobody was left without support in a difficult situation.
Thank you Codemate, you’ve done a good deed!
We can all do something impactful
This project is completely pro bono, meaning free of charge. At Codemate we have always strived to be good citizens, giving back to the causes, people and community. We had some earlier pro bono experience with AC Oulu in using our main skills, software design and development, in making an impact. So doing pro bono work was not completely new to us, but this time we sought beyond our immediate network to find the suitable cause.
We knew from the start that COVID crisis was hitting many people extremely hard, causing stress, depression and anxiety. MIELI’s mission is to help people in dealing with these issues and healing mentally. Having a chance to contribute to this noble cause was expected to resonate with our colleagues, but we were still surprised how many people volunteered to join the project. In fact, we had more volunteers than we could fit in the project.
Finally, we pose a challenge to every Finnish company:
How can your company help others?
What’s your cause?
REFERENCES
