Makpar’s Pragmatic Agile Approach to Developing Its Fraud Detection Analytics Dashboard

In response to the “short squeeze” that was applied to hedge funds by retail investors impacting GameStop’s stock price earlier this year, Makpar’s Innovation Lab developed a Fraud Detection Analytics Dashboard proof of concept to help a government agency prevent a similar situation from happening in the future.

A critical element in the development of this dashboard was the use of Pragmatic Agile development, and human-centered design – along with a swarm methodology – that reinforces how Makpar’s Innovation Lab is on the cutting-edge of developing next-generation, mission-enabling solutions for government.

“In addition to the Innovation Lab, we also launched an Agile Center of Excellence at Makpar, which gives us a base foundation for our entire team to develop agile frameworks,” said Tariq Islam, Director Technology & Solutions at Makpar. “We call this Pragmatic Agile, and we developed it at such a rapid pace. The first prototype of the dashboard was actually developed in two weeks.”

With the prototype targeting financial analysts, human-centered design played a key role in developing a user-friendly solution. Craig Cofrancesco, Solutions Architect at Makpar, actually served as the guinea pig for testing and designing this solution.

“I took on the persona of the financial analyst to determine whether or not there was potential for fraud,” said Craig Cofrancesco.  “I was able to work with the innovation lab’s front-end, and they developed a high fidelity mockup that served as the basis for a back-and-forth conversation. They were able to quickly hammer it out, by taking my user story, and creating a great communications tool with it.”

While human-centered design has been around since 1980, and is typically paired with waterfall development, the key is being practical in IT development approaches with swarm methodologies.

“The key is being practical in your approach,” said Peter Cofrancesco, Innovation Engineer at Makpar. “Waterfall development presents a couple of issues when you are trying to develop and plan in parallel. Based on swarm methodologies, our high-fidelity mock up very much assisted all of our developers and helped us to clarify when there was any confusion about what functionality was expected.”

Finally, this innovation approach to IT development, and the efforts behind the Makpar Fraud Detection Analytics Dashboard, can be very easily replicated for other government use cases.

“The purpose of the innovation lab is to solve unique challenges that our customers are having,” said Islam. “The process, methodology, rapid development and technology can all be replicated for similar problems in government. For example, in the healthcare and financial sectors, even at the Department of Defense, most agencies have fraud detection problems. Once the nature of the problem is identified, then we can do everything in a very similar manner.”

To learn more about Makpar’s Fraud Detection Analytics dashboard, please listen to this recent podcast with Tariq Islam, Craig Cofrancesco and Peter Cofrancesco.

Read the full case study about Makpar Fraud Detection Analytics Dashboard here.  In addition, if you are a federal agency in need of a similar dashboard, please click here to contact Makpar’s team.