The COVID-19 pandemic caused soaring demand for MSPP’s PrepMod vaccine management solution as state governments scrambled to roll out vaccines as quickly as possible. Faced with unexpectedly rapid adoption, Tiffany’s team was challenged to scale their solution to meet demand. On top of this, the sudden surge in uptake was causing urgent performance issues. Struggling to keep up with demand, the situation felt untenable and Tiffany began considering what she believed to be her only two options: bring in a technical partner, or consider transferring her customers to a larger company.

From day one, thoughtbot dug in as team members, not consultants, and were unafraid to take the heat with MSPP, whilst celebrating the wins together.

With the future of PrepMod’s capabilities at stake, the thoughtbot team hit the ground running. Drawing on recommendations from a consulting firm that had begun instituting performance enhancements, they conducted their own assessments and interviews to lay the foundations for improvement. 

Given the importance of the work, both our COO, Chad Pytel and CTO, Joe Ferris led the effort and 5 -7 developers from our Boost team, embedded directly and began weekly iterations to scale and improve the PrepMod app.  One of the most substantial efforts was led by the thoughtbot Mission Control team, who was responsible for a complete, complex, and comprehensive migration from Heroku to AWS. The migration was planned in a way that introduced no down time so that millions of people could continue to receive their critical COVID-19 vaccinations. 

As the pandemic evolved, so too did the needs of MSPP’s customers. At the start of the vaccine rollout, the focus was on scaling the system to cope with the demand for appointments and the need to prioritize supply by demographic. As vaccine supply increased to match demand, the focus shifted to user experience with the aim of reducing friction for those experiencing vaccine hesitancy. 

At the same time as scaling, developing, and maintaining the PrepMod app, the thoughtbot team were adding value by respectfully mentoring and upskilling the MSPP team. And when thoughtbot did make mistakes, they led by example with accountability and an explanation, respecting the trust placed in them by Tiffany and her team.

With thoughtbot as a technical partner, MSPP was able to scale its vaccine management solution to serve more than 27 states during the COVID-19 pandemic including California, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. The number of vaccination records grew from 50K to 20M. thoughtbot helped MSPP’s development team to grow from to 30, establishing an engineering culture and robust development lifecycle. The MSPP team refined how they expressed requirements, translated these to tickets, implemented the work, and tested the code. They developed a more formal approach at all stages of the development process which they are taking forward into the future.

thoughtbot became colleagues, not just consultants, bringing positivity to what was a stressful situation and enhancing MSPP’s credibility with their customers that continues to help them today.