What it was
iComply helps dental practices keep their compliance work in order and prepare for CQC inspections. Four of us rebuilt it in Django, PostgreSQL and React over 18 months. We covered the recurring tasks and calendars, policies, dashboards and finance work, with subscriptions and single sign-on across the Agilio products. The old system worked, but people didn't enjoy using it. We redesigned the interface as part of the rebuild and showed the client working software every week.
Build
- The rebuild used Django and PostgreSQL behind a React frontend.
- Tasks, policies and calendars cover the practice's recurring compliance work. Dashboards show its position and help groups of practices prepare for inspections.
- Subscriptions and single sign-on connect iComply to the rest of the Agilio suite.
- The finance module includes the ledger described below.
Key decisions
Weekly demos
We put a working build in front of the client every week. They could tell us what was wrong with it while there was still time to change the direction.
The interface
The legacy product was functional but unloved. We used the rebuild to reconsider how people did their daily work in it, alongside replacing the underlying software.
Lesson learned
They said 'dual-ledger'. We built six weeks of accounting.the rest of it ↓fold it back up ↑
The weekly demos made this the best delivery I'd worked on. We gathered feedback and made decisions with the client in the room, and I've kept that habit since. Late on they mentioned wanting a 'dual-ledger' system. We took the phrase at face value and spent six weeks building double-entry accounting, including journals and tax handling. It turned out they'd read the term somewhere and weren't sure what it meant. They wanted a simple finance ledger, about a week's work. The extra accounting machinery stayed in the product. Every later finance feature had to work through it, and we felt that for months. We'd skipped the demo and the questions on this part of the system.