The Forté Institute

THE COMPANY

The Forté Institute creates tools that help organizations improve their communication and team-building skills. The Forté Survey and Report has been used globally for over 30 years, helping organizations of all sizes develop and improve their communication and self-awareness skills. Forté clients who utilize their personal development software report an immediate improvement in workflow and performance.

CHALLENGES

Forté came to Dowd Technology Group with an existing ASP.NET webforms application that spanned 40 years of software. Forté needed us to take over support and development of their software, which is truly the core of their business. We saw this as an extremely important role in their ability to succeed as a business. Forté had no modern development cycle and lacked many modern and up-to-date solutions. Forté was paying for services, such as Salesforce, but not utilizing their tools and benefits.

A top concern was long response time for certain issues and client issues, as well as the task of translating their surveys into new languages to reach more users.

SOLUTION

The first thing we prioritized while working with Forté was the implementation of communication tools and a project management workflow that would catch more issues and prioritize those issues. We quickly began building their customer list and importing their customer data into Salesforce to make sure they were taking advantage of their existing tools.

Dowd Technology Group made sure the first step was to provide an infrastructure that would improve technology solutions for The Forté Institute.

We added modern software tools, such as error tracking and error notifications, in order for their administrators to be efficiently alerted if and when there is a software breakdown.

We implemented version control for their software. This allowed Forté the ability to compare files, identify differences and merge the changes if needed prior to committing any code. This helps to keep track of application builds by being able to identify which version is currently in development, QA and production. The utilization of version control helps prioritize tasks to ensure time and money are not being wasted. This proved to be highly effective and efficient during the translation of their surveys and the launch of their Korean translations.

RESULTS

By streamlining communication, prioritizing tasks and setting up an efficient workflow we have improved The Forté Institute's response time for identifying errors and improving response time for customers.

The project was completed within budget due to our ability to prioritize with our project management tools and technology.

Forté is seeking to refactor their code to isolate services and continue the journey of building their infrastructure and technology value as a company. Due to the help of Dowd Technology Group’s collaborative efforts, Forté is poised to start marketing and driving traffic to their site, which affords us the opportunity to revamp their front-end and embark on a new phase in marketing.