Loudoun County Public Schools adopted OutSystems to escape its legacy of 35 hard-to-maintain web applications. Its five developers are now rapidly crushing their backlog while improving efficiency and user experience for families, students, and staff.
Just five developers support Loudoun County Public Schools (LCPS), which is the third-largest school division in Virginia, with 97 campuses and a $1.3 billion budget.
From a user experience perspective, a key objective was to create a more consistent look and feel across its portfolio of more than 35 applications developed on various technologies.
“Once our developers experienced the speed and flexibility that OutSystems provides, there's been no looking back. We've fully embraced agile development. The speed of development with OutSystems means we can demonstrate progress every two weeks and pivot when we need to— a real boost for team morale."
The team also sought to improve the velocity of maintenance and enhancements to create more opportunities for rapid innovation.
LCPS adopted OutSystems in October 2020 to pursue its user experience, responsiveness, and efficiency objectives.
"Once our developers experienced the speed and flexibility that OutSystems provides, there's been no looking back," says Kara Bane, Supervisor of Data Science and Digital Solutions. "We've fully embraced agile development. The speed of development with OutSystems means we can demonstrate progress every two weeks and pivot when we need to—a real boost for team morale."
Speed-up development and improve agility
Deliver public-facing web apps and portals
Decrease application maintenance costThe team's first application was a summer school registration system wrapped in a student opportunities portal. Delivered within six months, the student opportunities portal will house all student and family-facing enrollments, providing a "single point of entry" for families to discover and apply for LCPS offerings.
"Around 80 percent of this early development was foundational," explains Kara. "We now reuse modules to deliver other applications faster."
Using OutSystems delivered numerous early wins for LCPS, including standardized responsive UI templates and simplified and more automated business processes. Integrating secure single-sign-on through existing core systems has improved the ease of access and usability for all stakeholders.
Additional benefits include sharing data across systems, automated processes, and significantly reduced time required for data entry.
The team was able to quickly and easily integrate Loudoun County Public Schools' BI platform, which has streamlined access to information that resides across multiple applications.
Looking ahead, LCPS expects to transition its remaining web portfolio to OutSystems and proactively deliver solutions as new needs arise while dramatically cutting maintenance costs and improving efficiency and user experience.
