Campground tsunami

May 28, 2010

How Manitoba based companies created a model parks reservation system

In early 2006, Protegra led a consortium of Manitoba based companies in response to a request from the Manitoba government.. The Province wanted a robust, highly customized, intuitive parks reservation site that could handle high traffic levels. It had to meet the needs of a wide variety of users, support numerous customer service enhancing features and allow the Department to maintain and build upon content over time. And it had to be up and running in three months.

"The eleven week development to deployment timeframe on Phase I was a significant challenge," says Wadood Ibrahim, Protegra's CEO, "particularly with six different organizations involved. A great deal of effort was required."

Fortunately, the teams involved had a clearly articulated vision of the need. That, says Ibrahim, went a long way towards creating the solution. "Prior to being awarded the project, in the RFP stage, we designed a prototype of the user interface from a camper's perspective," he says. "One of our employees is an avid camper and designed what he thought would be a good interface for reserving campsites in Manitoba. Once we were awarded the project, we redesigned the interface to satisfy both the camper's needs and Manitoba Conservation's needs."

Those needs included improving the quality of customer service both online and through the call centre, building in the flexibility for Manitoba Conservation to control administrative functions, inventory, maps and maintenance, enhancing systems for campground staff to manage sites at the field level, and providing for easy to use reporting tools. It was also imperative that the site be able to handle extraordinary volumes of traffic in concentrated periods.

"We knew we'd get a huge number of hits on opening day," says Tracy Elbourne, Head, Recreation Programming Manitoba Parks, Manitoba Conservation. "We take a different approach to reservations than many other park jurisdictions in that all inventory and dates are offered on opening day, rather than rolling out incrementally over time. It's believed that our customers want the opportunity to make reservations when they want to, rather than waiting for the next window of opportunity to see if they're successful. As a result, there's a tsunami effect experienced on opening day. The application must be able to handle the load. Manitoba Parks controls the flow of hits into the application on opening day to avoid performance issues, but we are very pleased that we continue to handle more and more traffic earlier in the day each year."

Ibrahim agrees. He says the project was a rewarding one not only in terms of Protegra's ability to deliver on an innovative solution, but also because of the extensive teamwork approach required. " We are very proud, not only of the solution, but of the collaboration between service providers (Function Four, Map It Out, and ID Fusion), and the partnership with Manitoba Conservation and Manitoba Information and Communications Technology Services."

Looking back, Ibrahim says the experience confirmed what he already knew: good people create good technology. "The project provided us with evidence yet again that lean thinking, agile processes and iterative development make it possible to deliver solutions of this size in such a short period of time. Involving the users from the very beginning and throughout the process is critical. Never underestimate the value of performance testing in production environment before the launch of a new system.

"The whole thing confirmed for me that the most important point is having the right people on your team," he says. "Without them, no process or technology will help you achieve breakthrough solutions."