Federal

PRAC

Pandemic Response Accountability Committee (PRAC). The Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (CARES Act) and other Coronavirus response legislation encompass a wide-ranging effort to respond to the health, economic, and societal impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. This included the creation of the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee (PRAC). The PRAC partnered with Mobomo to create a user-friendly, public facing website to promote greater accountability and transparency of the CARES Act relief funds.

Prac

Pandemic Response Accountability Committee (PRAC). The Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (CARES Act) and other Coronavirus response legislation encompass a wide-ranging effort to respond to the health, economic, and societal impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. This included the creation of the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee (PRAC). The PRAC partnered with Mobomo to create a user-friendly, public facing website to promote greater accountability and transparency of the CARES Act relief funds.

Prac dashboard

THE GOAL.

Mobomo was asked to redesign, develop and deploy a new website for the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee (PRAC) built using a Drupal content management system (CMS) and deployed into the Microsoft Azure cloud. This site needed to comply with US Web Design Standards (USWDS) and the IDEA Act for mobile-responsive design. In order to create an ease of usability for viewers, the website also needed to support displaying interactive graphics. These graphics would showcase the distribution of funds, as well as reports of fraudulent instances.

The biggest and most daunting goal was to design, develop and deploy this new website within the tight timeframe of 5 weeks.

WHAT WE DID.

APPROACH

The PRAC had quickly developed a basic Drupal 8 CMS application at the start of the coronavirus pandemic and were hosting it within another agency’s Amazon Web Services (AWS) environment. After reviewing the legacy system and understanding the enhanced requirements of the PRAC for the new system, Mobomo elected to rebuild the CMS leveraging the latest version of Drupal 9. Mobomo, in consultation with its program partners, leveraged an Agile Scrum management approach for designing and developing the website to meet the demanding timeframe of just 5 weeks. Mobomo managed 3 different work streams (UI/UX Design, Drupal Development, Azure Websites PaaS integration) in parallel to ensure it delivered the critical site functionality on-time and within the program budget.

DESIGN

Mobomo conducted a complete website design overhaul, including the creation of a new website logo, modern branding elements, and highly mobile-responsive theme to preserve the ability of mobile users to fully engage with the website’s interactive data charts and graphs. Normally, this process that can take weeks or even months to complete. The Mobomo UI/UX team worked tirelessly in the early stages of the engagement to rapidly design the new style guide and core branding elements to assist the PRAC in redefining their image. Additionally, Mobomo leveraged the USWDS theme as its base and built a custom sub-theme to incorporate the newer, modern design features while still remaining compliant with core USWDS best practices. This simplified the design process and helped to ensure that we’d meet the necessary deadlines.

INFRASTRUCTURE

It was a requirement to launch the new website within the Microsoft Azure cloud. In collaboration with our infrastructure partners, Smartronix, the team decided to leverage the Azure Websites platform-as-a-service (PaaS) hosting solution, as it met the FedRAMP requirements for IT security. The Mobomo and Smartonix teams worked together to architect the environment to support a zero-downtime, blue-green deployment structure that would allow for seamless promotion of new code to the public-facing environment.

Next, to manage website performance under increased traffic, the team implemented the Azure Frontdoor application delivery network (ADN) and load balancers. This effectively managed callbacks to the origin and provided a high-performing user experience.

Prac dashboard

THE SOLUTION.

Mobomo developed pandemicoversight.gov on the latest version of Drupal 9, a decision made in part due to wanting to avoid having to perform subsequent migrations with the upcoming retirements of both Drupal 7 and Drupal 8, but also to showcase the PRAC’s commitment to technical innovation. In an effort to streamline development across such a large team to meet the timeframe for delivery, Mobomo leveraged Lando and containerization for ease in local development configuration and integrated it into a CI/CD pipeline to ensure daily builds of the environment and to hook into our automated testing framework to ensure only clean code deployments made its way into the Azure environment.

To allow for the enhanced data chart and graph visualizations to be integrated within the Drupal CMS seamlessly, Mobomo developed new custom media entities leveraging the Drupal Core Media Module. This allowed for the high-fidelity visualizations developed by Domo and Woolpert to be easily created as content entities and embedded anywhere within the system on-demand. This allows the PRAC to develop new visualizations and quickly make them available to the public as new data surrounding coronavirus relief funding is made available.

THE RESULTS.

The project for redesigning, developing and launching the new pandemicoversight.gov website officially began on August 3, 2020. The new Drupal 9, Azure hosted website was launched publicly on September 10, 2020. Within the first couple of weeks, the site had already received thousands of visitors looking to explore who, where and how coronavirus relief spending is being utilized.

We are pleased to announce the pandemicoversight.com has also won two awards since it’s competition: 2020 Arcturus Winner in the Government Website category from Vega Digital Awards and a 2021 Gold Winner in the COVID category from Muse Creative Awards.

PRAC

ELEGANT
SOLUTIONS
START
HERE.

Content-rich websites. High-performance mobile apps. Bulletproof cloud solutions. Bring us your toughest challenge and we’ll show you the path to an elegant solution.

Contact Us

New project request.