PLEASE – platform for life enablement through altruism and social engagement

The Story

PLEASE is a platform to match, in real time, demand and supply of life enablement services. Just like Uber and Airbnb, the PLEASE platform makes use of “idle capacity” in terms of capability and availability of people who want to perform “life enablement” services for those who seek them, for altruistic purposes. This community that is developed can then be tapped into by corporations or governmental organizations to reward this altruism through recognition and incentives. PROCOMM put together an agile project team of architects, designers and developers to design, build and run the platform within 4 months time. The platform has successfully been launched in several cities in Belgium. Also, PROCOMM consulted TRIAMANT group (Belgium) on setting up a legal entity for this venture to drive their digital strategy.

The Solution

The platform is essentially a means to connect demand for life enablement by a specific demographic of people, with a supply of subscribers (members) idle time and desire to be ENABLERS. The target demographic is the aging population who are either autonomous or semi-autonomous. Whereas this type of life enablement has typically been viewed through the lens of either volunteers or health care professionals, we regard this as an open market of individuals (members / subscribers) who have a desire to serve the target population and have a certain percent of idle time that they would like to devote for this service.

In a first step the following strategic development options were discussed and decided upon:

• Strategy for Technology
  • Optimized for user experience
  • Optimized for budget
• Strategy for Architecture
  • Small-scale
  • Large-scale
• Strategy for Operations
  • Internalize
  • Externalize

In second step we setup the project with an agile methodology and together with the customer we optimized the scope to maximize the business-value for the given budget and time constraints. The team was staffed with architects, developers, UX designers, testers and project managers to cover all critical skills for the mission. The customer steered the priorities in the project as Product Owner and also managed the test user-groups in Belgium to ensure a close feedback-loop during the project.

The technologies used for development are Angular, ASP.NET Core, Entity Framework, MS SQL Server – all hosted on the Amazon Cloud.

The Result

In 4 month’s time the team designed and built the platform.

The platform is now being operated by the customer and rolled out in three cities in Europe.