Members of the Columbus team donated their time and expertise to develop a new mentor and mentee matching system for Overwatch Partnership.
At Centric, one of our core values is igniting the passion for the greater good. We try to do this in various ways with many different corners of the community.
At the beginning of 2018, we identified an organization in Columbus that gives back also: The Overwatch Partnership (OWP).
This organization matches veterans with mentors in the community to assist in the transition from active duty to the civilian workforce while helping to build their professional network. After meeting with members of OWP, Mike Rogers, Eric Gentzel, and Don Caluya, areas of need were identified and Centric swiftly began building the foundation for an application to suit OWP’s needs.
Over more than 8 months, Jonathan Flatt, Matt Miller, Mike Brooks, and others on the Columbus team have been working hard by donating over 125 hours of work on creating an application for OWP to automate some of their back-office processes. This includes entering mentors/mentees into the system, using a “smart” matching system, tracking the match via an admin dashboard, reporting, and many other features.
This application will significantly reduce the amount of time it takes for the Overwatch Team to do tedious, manual, back-office tasks and allow them to spend more time in interpersonal work with their mentors and mentees. This will also pave the way for the organization to begin to grow more rapidly and allow for easier application for both mentors and mentees to accommodate this growth.
On November 27, our team presented a quick demonstration on all of the functionality in the application to OWP. After the meeting, OWP Co-founder Eric Gentzel had this to say about the project:
“The development of our new mentor matching system will be an incredible improvement for our existing process of matching a Mentee with a Mentor. The new system will provide a user-friendly sign up experience, in which our veteran Mentees can pick their Mentor with calculated recommendations for the best fit, based on their experience and interests.
Centric has provided outstanding support on this project, which will save us hours of manual work to match and report on our Mentor program. Thank you Centric, we are grateful for your time and talents to help our nonprofit and support veterans in the community!”
We would like to thank OWP for their support on this project throughout the year! We look forward to seeing how OWP continues to grow.