who we are client success stories

Client: Multinational high tech company specializing in computers for individual and business consumers

The issues: This client, a Fortune 100 powerhouse, insists on a commitment to its customers and on environmentally responsible business practices. To better serve its larger, enterprise-level customers in business and government, the company had created a premium procurement and support website solely for them, and had implemented the website in numerous countries across the Americas, the EMEA region, and Asia.

In each country where the premium website operated, a local development team was charged with maintaining, enhancing, and upgrading the site in that country. Each team’s responsibilities included all of the applications, along with their corresponding code, for the local site. To address the voluminous amount of code, each team held a technical lead, a QA lead, and a migration lead, all of whom supervised staffs of anywhere from 10 to 20 software engineers and specialists.

The client’s goal was to address geographical and cultural issues with immediacy and flexibility, but that goal was undermined by a lack of standards and process. Rapidly, all of the premium channels in all of the participating countries were operating with a different version, patch level, and release schedule, resulting in varying levels of functionality, product availability, service, and support for customers. Also, each team developed, compiled, and tested code using largely manual processes, relying on the efforts of a few talented team members to pull everything together at the last minute.

Furthermore, as is the biggest risk factor with geographically distributed projects, communication between the teams was weak. The autonomy given to each team discouraged interaction and information sharing with other teams. When teams did communicate, ill-defined reporting relationships and disjointed communication paths resulted in competing and vague information.

Daily customer activity challenged this communication network. When customer transactions crossed team and codebase borders—which transactions often did because this client's large, premium customers were themselves international—performance bottlenecks would ensue. Resolving them was difficult and sluggish, since the client had a difficult time determining who should be responsible for defect resolution and for other project activities.

A companywide quarterly release of the premium website was approaching. This client needed all of the teams to be ready, and wanted all of the separate code to reach a unified baseline.

Clarity solution: Clarity supplied a single resource to assume two roles that the client was lacking: a release manager (since a client resource in this position had recently vacated the position) and a program manager. While each development team had a project manager to guide the release process, these PMs had no clear accountability to a centralized authority who would ensure controlled and timely code integration. And the premier website itself had no advocate in the form of a program manager who would align strategy and best practices with business requirements, IT constraints, and customer demands. Clarity became this centralized authority and advocate.

Also recognizing that tight, well-communicating teams produce better applications and prevent many development problems before they occur, Clarity also became a facilitator and champion for clearly defined, open communications at this client.

Clarity’s Release/Program Manager performed the following tasks over a six-month timeframe:


  • Led a full software development life cycle (SDLC) and infrastructure upgrade, a successful product launch, and a product transition into the company’s operations environment.


  • Established and documented persistent code release standards and guidelines for tasks, milestones, deliverables, issue reporting and resolution, and status reporting.


  • Created a launch organization document to capture, communicate, maintain, and update team information on readiness, dependencies, project tracking, defect rates and status, and release date forecasting.


  • Incorporated information from Mercury Quality Center, an integrated, web-based suite of tools and best practices for automated software quality testing, into the development cycle.


  • Managed the remedy change ticket process.


  • Coordinated teleconferencing and digital communications among 30 domestic and international project stakeholders, 43 client business units, and five globally distributed teams containing a total of 111 members.

Results:


  • The client’s premiere channel achieved code baseline ahead of the launch schedule, ensuring that the premier website presented an integrated experience and ease-of-use from discovery to fulfillment for its target customers worldwide.


  • The new transparent, component-based, delineated, and repeatable SDLC enabled teams to resolve not only the high priority issues, but many of the lower priority ones as well. Customers more effectively received the service that they needed, along with the geographical and cultural customization that they expected.


  • Clarity provided the operational and organizational foundation that this client continues to use for its premier customer channels, and that it has translated to the development process for many other geographically dispersed products and services.