ABOUT

The Community Learning Centre (CLC) is a part of British Airways that hosts school trips and other visitors to educate them about geography, languages, IT etc. all the while promoting the BA brand and potentially creating future employees. They also hold interviews for the available work experience roles across the company.

In 2015, we as apprentices were set on an ‘Innovation Project’ where we had to find a real project within the company that could actually solve and issue or add some value. We spoke to the CLC and they told us about their booking process, whereby they had to email trip organisers individually and record their bookings in an Excel spreadsheet stored on SharePoint. This also meant they had no protection against last minute cancellations or no-show trips which could meant they prepare for a whole day of activity and then have to spend it unproductively.

Our proposal was to create a booking tool, accessible online to the CLC staff and event organisers (e.g. Teachers for a school trip). The idea was to have the ability to list the available programmes on the website, then a teacher can log ion and select a programme they wish to book, find an available time slot, fill in all the relevant details and then send off an application that will be received by one of the CLC staff (depending on who hosts that event). Then all the CLC need to do is accept the request and it will get automatically added to their schedule, and remove that date from the available time slots for that programme.

We approached this project as a team of four apprentices each specialising in a relevant technology for the production of this tool (Design/Front end, PHP, data handling and Project Management). As a customer facing tool, it had to look attractive, professional and simple. This was my main role in the production of the tool, taking the photos and creating the graphics used on the website as well as designing the layout and coding it all using HTML, CSS and AngualrJS.

The result was a finished, working booking tool that was tested with clients and handed over to the CLC. As of now however, the tool cannot go live because it is dependent on the rest of the CLC’s new website going live which wasn’t part of our project and hasn’t been completed by the responsible developers.