DBJ's Voucher for Technical Assistance Portal

As part of its push to build a business-friendly ecosystem, the Development Bank of Jamaica launched the Voucher for Technical Assistance (VTA) Programme in May 2014. Its aim is mainly to make it easier for micro, small and medium-sized enterprises to access loans.

The pilot of the project performed well. But DBJ recognised areas where it could be improved. One such area was the system’s accessibility. The DBJ wanted entrepreneurs to be able to apply for the vouchers online, so it asked Panmedia to upgrade the functionality and create a new web design.

We recognised that the portal would now be more complex in nature with much of its functionality automated. A key issue technically and in terms of security is that the site now has 9 user roles, each with their own unique set of capabilities. The DBJ and Panmedia teams worked tirelessly on the requirements document (RD) fully aware that proper preparation was key. The RD had to be prepared to capture the full scope of the project and be used as a reference point during and after development. There was much back and forth between the DBJ team and Panmedia’s web developers. We all worked hard to clear up even simple but nonetheless painful issues with jargon and process flow for users.

We didn’t wait to complete the RD to start on the website, so we worked on several things simultaneously. We built the site on the Drupal content management system. Because the automation is the killer app in the upgrade, heavy use was made of the rules and related modules to give the individual user roles their custom capabilities.  The site controls what information a user can enter, when they can enter it and how much information they can see from data already entered by other users.

We met some challenges migrating the data entered and used in the pilot of the programme by the approved financial institutions (AFIs) and the business development organisations (BDOs). We reused almost everything but a lot of it had to be reformatted to work with the new reporting system.

The website launches this month right after Panmedia has trained the relevant DBJ staff to overseeing the project and handle maintenance. The portal will make the process more accessible to MSMEs and the DBJ expects the Voucher for Technical Assistance Programme to get heavy use from entrepreneurs.