EXPO 2020 DUBAI UAE

Accreditation at a Mega Event

WHO ARE THEY?

Expo 2020 was a World Expo hosted by Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, from 1 October 2021 to 31 March 2022.

Originally scheduled for 20 October 2020 to 10 April 2021, it was postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic in the United Arab Emirates. The event had recorded more than 24 million visits in its six months.

ACCREDITATION SERVICES FOR EXPO 2020

Accredit Solutions provided the Accreditation services for EXPO 2020 processing the information, photographs, documents and background checks of 750,000 staff. A phased roll out of integrations was delivered between commencement in January 2019 to January 2020 go live.

KEY FACTS:

• One of the largest global events taking place during the pandemic

• 250,000+ accreditation applications

• 14 integrations, including government agencies

• Security and health vetting for workers across 192 country pavillions

• 200,000+ accreditation passes printed

Detailed Planning and Agile Development

Detailed planning was essential in achieving our successful launch on time and on budget. Following scoping sessions and fit gap analysis a transparent roadmap was maintained. Using the agile development method we ensured that our plan was flexible and dynamic enough to react to the changing needs of the business. User Stories, wireframes and test cases ensured the realised project always matched the expectations. Constant engagement allowed stakeholders opportunities to suggest ideas and amend approaches during scoping and UAT. Dedicated resources for the project were available at all times. We utilised a combination of In-Office / In-Region support while our strategically based global team was able to assist outside of business hours.

Innovative Solutions for Accreditation Process

Through innovative solutions we supported the end to end Accreditation process facilitating data submission, background checks, workforce processing, reporting and pass production.

DATA SUBMISSION

With over 1000 responsible organisations submitting data we implemented various methods to suit all APOCs. forms, invitations, API’s and Imports.

INTEGRATIONS

The Accreditation system was the central and complete source of staff data for other departments and operations, as such it interfaced seamlessly with a range of other contractor applications to send and receive data via API or integration.

Adding Value and Flexibility to EXPO 2020 Project

Our solution added high value to the EXPO 2020 project. Our flexible approach and openness to new ideas allowed ultimate configuration for this particular project use case. We shared our knowledge from other projects and worked closely with the business team, other contractors and stakeholders to build the ideal platform; easy to use; highly secure and robust. We also offered new functionality build out of our scope to assist the process at no extra cost.

Proactive Incident Avoidance and Configuration

• Our forward planning and implementation strategy including thorough testing and monitoring to proactively avoid incidents.

• If there were incidents these would be logged to our support desk and tracked against the Service Level Agreements.

• The support desk is monitored from strategic time zones and developers are on hand to assist when required.

• All incidents are tracked and document for futureproofing.

• Our primary aim in the creation of our product was to ensure that we can accommodate different requirements without the need for out of scope development work.

• Our unlimited User Role Suite is fully configurable:

  • All functionality can be switched on and off through 200 quick fire configurations. All reports, data views, emails and branding can be changed by the business team.

  • All default terminology can also be changed using over 4000 text mappings.

Efficient Change Management and Learning

If changes are required, our team ensured that changes represent the best value for the product sharing knowledge and experience during the scoping phase. During this period our team often proposed alternative ideas fulfilling the aims of the business but at significantly lower impact. If a change is needed the scope is drawn up and broken down into sub tasks along with effort count, schedules and any risk register. This has allowed the business team to pick those which most fulfil their requirements and ensure that deadlines and budgets were always met.

Flexible API and Data Validation

Constantly learning and evolving during this project we had the opportunity to gain knowledge and ideas from the Accreditation experts; enhancing the UI and implementing new features. Some particular learnings we address was around the need for further advanced configuration. We encountered the expected changing requirements from background checking agencies so constructed our API’s to be more flexible. Some data arriving at the system from 3rd party sources did not meet our exacting standards, so we implemented configurable validations to stop this at the source.