Widows and Orphans Management System

A management system for the organisation's widows and orphans function — the records, the processes, and the reporting for a programme whose entire purpose depends on getting individual cases right. The function handles personal and financial information about bereaved families, which makes data accuracy and controlled access the defining requirements rather than optional extras.

The function was maintaining case information for vulnerable beneficiaries in a way that made the records harder to work with than they should have been. Records were held in a form that made it hard to see a complete case, hard to establish who was responsible for it, and hard to produce accurate figures on support provided — which matters because the function's credibility with its beneficiaries and its funders rests on those figures being right.

What made it hard

• Started from the fact that this is a case-management function, not a record-storage function — so the data model had to represent a case and its history, not a list of entries.
• Separated the question of who may see a record from the question of what a record contains, so that access control could be designed deliberately.
• Identified that manual figure assembly was both a workload and an accuracy risk, and that fixing it served the beneficiaries directly through better reporting.
• Recognised that the data structure needed to support future analysis — a function that cannot be measured cannot be improved.

A web-based management system with a MySQL database holding structured case records. The data model represents a case as an entity with its own history, so a complete picture of a beneficiary's circumstances is retrievable rather than assembled from fragments. Access to sensitive records is controlled through the application rather than through the physical custody of a file, and reporting on programme activity is produced from the structured data rather than from manual tallies.

Case model

Structured case records representing a beneficiary's circumstances as an entity with a history.

Controlled access

Access to sensitive records governed by the application rather than by physical custody of a file.

Validated capture

Data validation applied so that the record base remains trustworthy for reporting.

Programme reporting

Activity and support figures derived from the structured records.

• Documented the existing case process to establish what a complete case record must contain.
• Designed the MySQL schema around cases and their histories rather than around flat record lists.
• Built validation into data entry so the record base stays reliable.
• Implemented role-based access so that sensitive records are visible only to those who need them.
• Deployed the system and built programme reporting from the structured records.

• Structured case management with a retrievable history per case.
• Role-based access control over sensitive beneficiary records.
• Data validation applied at entry to keep the record base reliable.
• Programme and support reporting derived from the structured records.
• A data structure that supports later analysis of trends in need.

• Made a complete case picture retrievable in one place, rather than assembled from separate records.
• Improved the accuracy of programme reporting by deriving figures from structured data instead of manual tallies.
• Placed sensitive beneficiary information behind controlled access in the application.

Screenshots for this project have not been published yet.