Public Safety Testing
Public Safety Testing (PST) helps police, fire, and dispatch agencies across the country recruit and screen candidates, running the written and physical exams that feed hiring pipelines for hundreds of public safety departments. Their website is the front door for every candidate who registers, schedules a test, and tracks their results, and for every agency that relies on those results to hire.
When their previous developer moved on, they were left with a complex, business-critical site and no one to maintain it. Searching the Magento Certified Developer listings, they found Joe Oppegaard and Montana Banana. What started as a search for someone to keep the lights on became a partnership that has lasted since December 2014.
The Challenge
PST operates in a space that never stands still. Public-sector hiring is governed by state and local law, and those rules change. New regulations around candidate data, accessibility, privacy, and testing standards arrive regularly, and each one has to be reflected on the site accurately and on time. On top of that, the technology underneath the platform keeps moving, with new payment, security, and hosting requirements that have to be absorbed without disrupting candidates mid-registration.
They needed more than a vendor who could take a ticket and close it. They needed a team that understood their business well enough to anticipate what the next change would require, advise them on the right way to build it, and keep the whole platform stable while doing it.
The Approach
Montana Banana stepped in as PST’s custom development shop. Rather than a project with a start and an end, we built an ongoing engagement around a standing weekly meeting that has run continuously for more than a decade. Every week, we sit down with their team to review what is changing in their world, identify the updates the site needs, prioritize the work, and plan the next release.
That cadence lets us treat the site as a living product instead of a maintenance burden. Legal and regulatory changes get scoped the week they surface. Candidate and agency feedback turns into UI/UX improvements on a predictable schedule. Platform upgrades, security patches, and infrastructure changes are planned ahead rather than handled in a scramble. Because we know the codebase and the business, we can help them make an informed choice on not just how to build something but whether they should, and what it will mean for the candidates and agencies on the other side.
The Impact
Since December 2014, Montana Banana and PST have launched numerous features, fixes, platform updates, and UI/UX improvements together, and the site has stayed online and dependable through every one of them. PST has been able to respond to changing laws and regulations with confidence, adopt new technology as it has become available, and keep growing the number of agencies and candidates they serve without ever having to worry about who is going to maintain their platform.
Ten-plus years in, the ideas for improving the site keep coming, and the weekly meeting is still on the calendar. We plan on having a great business relationship for years to come.
