First reporting round of NXTGEN Hightech

That's a wrap!

Over the past two months, the first reporting period of the National Growth Fund programme NXTGEN Hightech took place via our reporting tool Het Groeiportaal. More than 800 users across 61 projects submitted their financial reports.

The portal allowed partners to submit their reports and project leaders to approve or reject them straight away. The programme office could monitor progress per project via the dashboard.

What we saw

In particular, we saw peak load in the last week before the reporting deadline. Our infrastructure, including the SharePoint integration, handled that peak well.

Chart of the number of submissions and approvals each day during the first reporting round — The number of submissions and approvals each day.

Chart of the cumulative number of submitted and approved reports during the first reporting round — The total number of submitted and approved reports over the reporting period.

Users were often active in the portal throughout the day, even at weekends. That made it harder to apply patches. Under our release policy, updates take place outside office hours; during the reporting period we tightened this to late evenings so as not to disturb users.

Learning for the next round

As a solution, from now on we will work with a maintenance banner announcing a patch or release. That way users know when the application may be briefly offline.

In short: we have once again learned a lot for the next reporting round.