MV Transportation’s integrated solution helps transit agencies improve mobility options

Agile approach proves valuable

One goal of the project was to create a multi-tenant platform that allows transit agencies worldwide to create pathway review programs while contributing to the public data set. The project team collaborated with transportation experts at The Taskar Center for Accessibility Technology at the University of Washington, which manages the OpenSidewalks project and had established a standardized data schema for this type of data collection. The close collaboration that was necessary among team members across four different organizations placed a premium on nurturing effective communications within a flexible development environment. “Beyond the shared clear vision and goals, the discovery phase of the project iteratively fine-tuned the envisioned solution, vetted out assumptions, created varying levels of detailed architectural artifacts, clarified data ownership, standards and governance and many more technical details,” says Hiwot Sidelil, professional application designer at DXC Technology, and a member of the project team.

An agile approach was used, with scrum and sprint teams delivering increments on a regular basis. The team also adopted a design-thinking approach in which development was persona-centered, integrating the possibilities of the technology and requirements for business success with user needs. “The early adoption of the persona-centered design thinking approach, paired with the Agile methodology, allowed us to iteratively discover, innovate, test, implement, get feedback, and improve the various components of the solution to meet and exceed the business requirements and expectations,” says Sidelil. “The ability of the team to implement an effective ‘forming-storming-norming-performing’ Agile model was key, including effective communications with all relevant stakeholders.”

“It was a very cohesive team and a very cohesive project that was run with a high level of governance and communication that made it successful,” Doughty says. “It was really all about communication, staying aligned across all parties and making sure everybody was moving toward the vision that we had.”

Originally called CommonPaths, the solution has been expanded and rebranded as MV Pathways^TM and is available for use by other transit agencies, even those that do not use the Trapeze platform. “It was built with the ability to integrate with whatever software they are using,” Doughty says. “The other data sources that are in use here are generally used across other public transit agencies. The multi-tenancy capabilities we developed makes that a very quick deployment for anyone else.”