School Party Travel Scheme

Background

Whilst working at Detica Peter Team Lead the technical design and development of the School Party Travel Scheme (SPTS).

Brief

Transport for London needed an on line system to help co ordinate the travel of school parties across London. The system needed to route travel requests to train operators, provide basic sanity checks on proposed excursions, manage and print tickets and provide tools to ensure no single station became congested at any time of day.

Approach

A Functional design and requirements was agreed between Detica and TfL, Peter then went on to produce a technical design, which included a proof of concept for key areas. This ensured the technical approach was clearly defined and potential problem areas mitigated early on. Development proceeded incrementally and iteratively with the customer reviewing working software and refining requirements where required. Finally Performance testing was carried out against a large volume of data and System testing ensured all functional requirements were delivered to specification.
The application was initially rolled out as a prototype to select London boroughs, and then across the whole of London.

Solutions

Key features of the application

• Secure logon and Password management
• 3 separate application views for TfL, School teachers and Train operating companies
• Workflow to route applications between 3 user groups
• Ability to detect where multiple applications clashed at the same stations
• Visual presentation of Journey
• Application of TfL branding and styling
• Clear online school teachers application process
• Validation against administrator defined business rules
• Ticket generation and printing
• Email at key stages in work flow
• Administration console to manage reference data

Testimonial

On completion of the Project, James Fox, Detica Account Manager said:

"Pete was an excellent team lead on the SPTS project who carefully managed the scope of the technical solution to ensure it was deliverable to the agreed timescales and budget. Pete's technical strengths and ability to run his team effectively resulted in him leading the development project on a day-to-day basis. Pete is also a good communicator who was able to articulate technical issues in a simple manner - this was much appreciated internally and by the client and I'd be very happy to work with Pete again."