Delivering Speed, Stability, and Self-Sufficiency

The context

Our client, a major organisation with over 30+ brands, aims to provide a cost-effective, secure, and easy-to-use platform to manage their web presence. 

Stability and usability issues were giving their current platform a bad reputation, and the cost to onboard new sites was prohibitive. 

With arcast’s assistance the client had made a business case for change, put in place technology foundations for a new platform, and had identified a Minimal Viable Product or MVP - the most suitable site to migrate first. Our client was concerned that they did not have the necessary experience or capacity in-house to execute this migration effectively and asked arcast to assist.

A lack of investment and the prospect of impending re-platforming meant that the backlog of improvements was growing by the week. As such it was imperative that sites could be migrated as quickly as possible to the new platform while reducing technical debt to make management of the platform significantly more cost effective.

Maximising value while staying on-budget

While an as-is migration to the new platform would result in improved stability and usability, arcast made the case to address further issues during migration as this would be more efficient than a migrate-then-fix approach.

During project kickoff we analysed potential improvements and identified quick wins with tangible business value which could be brought into scope. More complex items were pushed onto a post-migration backlog and low-value features were tabled for removal. 

With this approach, additional value could be delivered during migration while staying within the timeline and budgets, which had been determined assuming an as-is migration.

We created a clear plan, setting expectations for who needed to do what and when with an ambitious but achievable 14-week timeline to keep everyone focussed. Work streams for UX, development and content were executed in parallel for maximum effectiveness and progress was tracked on a weekly basis with reporting to key stakeholders on risks, key decisions and progress vs budget.

Focussed optimisation of customer experience

A key function of the site - making it clear whether applicants were eligible for certain grants was not functioning well. Support lines were jammed with applicants unable to find the right information on the website and the grants team was being swamped with ineligible applications. 

As such the decision was made to evaluate the grant application experience on the site with the aim of reducing support calls and ineligible applications and we executed a very focussed UX rethink of this key customer journey.  

Working closely with the support and grants teams, wireframe prototypes were created and tested with users to create an optimised experience. This would ensure applicant eligibility was clear before the grant application process could begin, and supporting content could be placed at key points of the application journey.

UX wireframe used as part of a prototype for user testing

Building for the future

One of the goals of the program was to enable a large number of sites to be managed by a small technical team. Key to achieving this was implementing a library of generic CMS and UI components that could be combined with site-specific content architecture and theming.

This would enable each brand site to be unique, while limiting the code footprint and enabling easy reuse of features across sites. A minimum set of components required for the MVP site were developed with this in mind, so that migration of subsequent sites could be significantly accelerated by leveraging this common library.

The component library

Components were thoroughly tested against a wide set of non-functional requirements to ensure much needed improvements were brought in accessibility, technical SEO and responsive design. Workshops were held with the client to help them understand how to improve functional website management from content SEO to deriving meaningful insights from analytics.

Streamlining content production

Site improvement was not limited to stability, maintainability and UX. arcast executed a holistic content audit, merging web analytics data with information from the legacy CMS to get a clear picture of which content was fresh and engaging. 

This enabled the migration process to be streamlined and triggered a rethink of the site’s content architecture and navigation. The number of site pages was reduced from 350 to 100, driving a pragmatic migration that was executed in less than two weeks.

Meanwhile, the content team were learning how to use the new platform in a very hands-on manner. Supported by arcast’s dev team they created new content ready for site relaunch. The modular design enabled them to put together new designs in ways which were not previously possible without developer intervention and initial feedback was very positive:

The Impact

The business, development, infrastructure and content teams collaborated well with arcast to get the first site live on time, and without issues. arcast handed over day-to-day management of the site to our client’s teams and took a back seat, providing support on an ad-hoc basis.

Almost immediately the benefits of the new platform can be seen:

• Engaged customers - pages load in less than a second, down from 5-10 seconds resulting in a more engaging customer experience.
• Unburdened support - the new UX resulted in less calls and fewer ineligible applications providing significant relief for the overworked grants team
• Happy editors - the new platform gave a 5x productivity boost for editors and tripled the level of website control
• No sleepless nights - zero security incidents or downtime in the first 3 months since go-live

The arcast effect

A key ingredient of project success is the M-shaped profile of our consultants. Their ability to operate across domains meant a core team of five was able to execute the entire project end to end. We augmented the team with an part-time UX specialist and worked with our client’s in house designer to ensure maximum impact on a limited budget.  

During project execution we ensured continuous involvement of our client’s teams so they understood why decisions were made and the way things work. It’s important to us that clients feel ownership of the solutions we provide and are not “locked-in” - dependent on us due to lack of knowledge or understanding. We want clients to continue to work with us because they value it, rather than they are forced to.

What happened next?

The ability to demonstrate results in just 14 weeks from kick-off to go-live gave stakeholders early validation of the value of the transformation program. This momentum and success continued as arcast assisted in the migration of further sites to the new platform.

The approach taken to make tangible improvements without compromising timelines, is now used as a blueprint. This enables decommissioning of the legacy platform on an ambitious but achievable timeline, while delivering greater business value than a like for like migration.