FairWay Resolution Ltd is New Zealand’s leading dispute resolution and conflict management organisation. Boasting over 100 specialist reviewers and dispute resolution practitioners, FairWay handles over 16,000 cases each year across all manner of industries.

But in order to manage conflict, FairWay was reliant on an increasingly outmoded and costly system to manage its cases. The legacy system had updatability, scalability, security and performance issues that desperately needed to be addressed. In short, the software was no longer fit for purpose.

It was clear that FairWay needed a modern, functional and cost effective case management solution that would allow the organisation to control system administration. They knew of Millpond’s reputation for delivering complex IT projects, and in July 2019 approached us with the project.

“Every time they wanted to make a change to the legacy system they had to put in a change request,” Senior Project Manager of Millpond explains. “This made the smallest modifications extremely costly, which led to no changes being made at all, resulting in a system that was in slow decay.”

Millpond was tasked with crafting a case management system that wasn’t just a fit for FairWay’s current purpose, but that could be adapted to the needs of the business over the next three to five years, and could be changed in-house where needed.

The challenges were many and varied. Not only did the Millpond team need to create a bespoke system that was flexible and configurable, they also had to manage the phase-out of the legacy system in a non-disruptive way.

The project was complex not simply because of the nature of the work, but also due to the environment the team worked in. Utilising experts in the US and Europe, the work was conducted across disparate time zones, and the impact to the business had the potential to be significant all the while.

Over the course of 13 months the Millpond team managed the development of a bespoke dynamic case management system that required significant customisation and design. A hybrid Agile/Waterfall approach was taken, which delivered product demonstrations to stakeholders early in the project development cycle.

Upwards of 15 key deliverables were used to measure the project’s success, including:

• Security: Due to the nature of their work, FairWay holds highly sensitive information for many of the most recognisable brands across NZ. With cyber-attacks on the rise and the Privacy Act 2020 to consider, system security had to be incredibly robust.
• Performance: Ensuring the new system offered up real-time information NZ wide, delivering instantaneous functionality.
• Integration: The new system needed to seamlessly integrate with Navision – an ERP for SMEs.
• Training: All stakeholders needed to be appropriately trained on the system.
• User acceptance testing: The system needed to perform as advertised, and with low barriers to entry.
• Deployment Plan: A failproof go live plan needed to be established that facilitated a seamless transition from the old system to the new system over the course of a weekend.