Project
Awards Management
System to handle nominations, voting, judging, and award distribution.
Context
The project was for automating a very paper-intensive and communication-heavy process. The project handled award nominations, award judging, internal calculating of judging outcomes and printing award winners list for use at awards events.
Architectural Decisions
- Chose WebForms initially due to ecosystem maturity and team familiarity in 2008.
- Created Single Sign-On (SSO) integration with internal identity provider.
Challenges
- Ensuring single sign-on reliability across multiple internal systems.
- Handling complex judging criteria and scoring algorithms.
- Designing user-friendly interfaces for non-technical users.
- Managing high traffic during award nomination periods.
- Managing large volumes of data (print-ready image files, large PDF files) by allowing quick upload online to replace emailing and faxing of nomination assets.
- Managing large data collection forms with many conditional fields and sections.
- Managing multiple user roles with different permissions (nominators, judges, admins).
- Collecting and safely storing payment information for nomination fees and integration with internal payment processing system.
Outcomes
Successfully automated the award nomination and judging process, significantly reducing paperwork and manual communication.
My Role
Lead Developer responsible for architecture, design, and implementation. Coordinated with stakeholders to gather requirements and ensure the system met business needs.
Notes
The application was later integrated into our membership portal to allow members and staff to easily access the awards system within the same portal they used for other membership services.