SportsGate LearnOnLine Platform

Action
As with any consumer-facing product targeted at the youth segment, the key to market success were rapid iterations in response to the feedback gathered from end-users. SportsGate closely interacted not only with the school students but also with their professors, coaches, parents, school superintendants, and as much as 11 National Governing Bodies. Additionally, a tight cooperation with several technology partners was important to ensure seamless integration of the new product with the existing systems used by several colleges and sports associations. To consistently meet the frequently changing product requirements, SSD set up the development process in a highly iterative manner using a combination of AGILE (Scrum) and XP (eXtreme programming) project management methodologies. In particular, SSD

• Assigned a dedicated project manager who coordinated gathering product requirements, wrote the technical specifications, oversaw the development, directed third-party system integration and Quality Assurance.
• Picked up an engineering team with the right skill-set from its existing pool of IT professionals with 5-10 years of experience in Consumer Internet space, backend architecture, and database design.
• Created clear project management processes based on a mix of Agile (Scrum) and XP (eXtreme programming) methodologies adapted for the project dynamic nature.
• Maintained regular voice communication with client-side senior executives and business development professionals.
• Kept the client constantly informed about the emerging project threats and risks. Provided regular progress tracking, project status updates, and dependency assessments.
• Established a centralized repository for change request management to make sure every client request, as well as every bug found by the Quality Assurance team, were taken care of in order of its priority with regard to the available time and resources.
• Organized continuous Quality Assurance of incremental improvements to ensure that the system modifications and extensions were properly tested and were released according to the desired schedule.

Product Highlights

• Rich instruments for online course set-up, configuration, management, impact tracking, and performance analysis, which could be adapted to the custom needs of a broad variety of educational institutions and sports associations.
• Secure role-based multi-layered access control.
• Possibility to manage complex organizational hierarchies of students, classes, faculty, and administrators, sharing membership in multiple groups and in a variety of roles.
• Easy-to-use wizards for seamless creation of new courses using existing educational materials.
• Possibility to monitor individual course progression and to produce targeted recommendations for improvement.
• Customizable Records of Achievement for further participation encouragement.
• Sophisticated Content Management Engine.
• Workshop Monitoring tools for collection of demographic information and assessment of workshop usefulness and impact on participants.
• Competition Management Toolkit allowing designated users to set, conduct, track and analyze a variety of internal and intercollegiate sports events.
• Opinion Polling Engine for custom market analysis activities, competition tracking, and events performance measurement.
• Personal calendars with the possibility for targeted broadcasting of important appointments and events.
• Private and shared diaries and notebooks.
• Consumer behavior monitoring and analysis.
• Controlled online chat, internal e-mail, and SMS messaging.
• Mobile access via major handheld devices.
• Secure conference sessions and virtual classrooms.
• Role-based SMS support for secure authentication, event notification, and purchase confirmation.
• Credit Purchase Integration toolkit enabling small sports associations and colleges to easily and securely accept payments for their memorabilia, products and services through Internet or mobile phone without the necessity of establishing a separate merchant account.
• Evidenced learning compliance for organizations to provide audit trails and evidence that users fully read and understood certain information before they engaged in the proposed activities.