At the beginning of 2020 ESO approved a project to create a new tool supporting its proposals evaluation processes, called P1Flow. The main idea was to upgrade a series of old and standalone tools that were used to handle ESO peer reviews, into one flexible interface that could offer a user-friendly experience to the reviewers and a complete overview of the process to the ESO operator.

Due to the pandemic and the impossibility to hold panel meetings in-person, the reference model of ESO peer review, i.e., face-to-face panel meetings with about 80 people invited every six months to work for some days altogether in the same location became unfeasible. The sudden need to hold online panel discussions put the project under significant time pressure to quickly provide basic interfaces so that the ESO peer review system could continue. This implied a staggered implementation and release of interfaces supporting different phases of the process. However, the old infrastructure had to continue working in parallel with the new system, to cover for the remaining phases of the review.

The first version of the tool was released in April 2021. The project will reach its completion by the end of 2024.

In the article we will describe the project, how we kept the legacy system and the new tools working together by migrating data from one domain to the other, the strategies we used to keep complexity low, how we introduced new workflows in the system (e.g. Distributed Peer Review), the current status of the project and its possible evolutions in the future.

The description of the technologies, the project plan, the team evolution with time according to the different needs will also be provided.