Small Board, Big Vision: Building an LA Platform In-House

For a smaller board of 22 employees we embarked on creating and hosting our own LA Platform starting in January of 2022. From there we planned, researched, met to plan out our subspecialty LA Platform launch for January of 2024 via a phased approach to our diplomates. Our initial goal was to release all of our subspecialties in 2024 but during planning and discussions we decided that was too big of a risk and were only going to release LA BIM in 2024.

To meet this timeframe we had to build from the ground up and meet regularly with all of our stake holders. Weekly meetings with core team, monthly meeting with larger group and quarterly meeting with leadership. Each step of the way we had to make sure we thought of every possible scenario to future proof our backend database and business needs for now and the next 5-10 years.
This involved allowing enough configuration to give the business flexibility to ask for changes and IT to adapt and be dynamic enough for unforeseen changes as we built the platform.

This required constant meetings, updating technical and business documentation and rewriting our technical backlogs. When we had around 80% of the needs defined when we started planning our milestones for all of our platforms needs in January of 2023. These milestones become smaller tasks and these tasks became wireframes, code and platform demoes. These wireframes and demos where key to moving forward and designing the look and feel and functionality needed for our Longitudinal Assessment Platform. We stayed in constant conversation with the business to verify each view.
All of our employees and hundreds of external diplomate testers allowed us to maximize testing to fully test this platform before launch to be as successful as it was in 2024.