Design & Development Capacity Extension

Objectives

  • Consolidate CMS & eCommerce System
  • Share the resources across 500+ sites
  • Centralise ERP integration & reuse
  • Centralise Customer Service Dashboard
  • Monitor & Track Resource usage
  • Control CMS & eCommerce

Resourcing Challenges:

  • Senior Technical Team Required
  • Architecture & Design Skills
  • Ability to work from Client Location
  • Enterprise grade experience
  • Distributed SOA Architecture
  • JSON, SOAP, REST Knowledge
  • 500+ Web sites to be migrated
  • Ability to mentor Reckitt team
  • Right to Hire
  • BAU take over from existing team

Relationship Highlights:

  • Started May 2011 and ongoing
  • Peak team size – 6
  • Multiple Levels
    • Lead Architect
    • Senior Developer MS.NET
    • Senior Developer Java
    • Senior Developer Share Point
    • Technical Architect – Adhoc
    • Consutlants – Adhoc
    • Senior Infrastructure Consultant

Business Challenges

Reckitt wanted to quickly put together a team to build consolidated Digital Platform that will support the business objectives. A program of this scale required strong architectural and design ability along with good development practice and background. Existing team was already busy maintaining & enhancing the existing eCommerce platform and had little time to get trained on technologies in question.

The obvious choice was to hire contract staff with relevant skills and experience to come in as additional hands on board and start developing the new program of work. However, this would have created a big gap in internal team’s knowledge and ability. The contract staff would retain the knowledge and there was no easy way to measure internal team knowledge at the time of handover.

Additional complexity was to manage the cost and resource utilisation across the resources were available to work again in future if similar problem came up.

Our Solutions

Surya proposed a hybrid “Contract To Hire” model of resourcing service. Surya engaged on fixed term and fixed price contract to conduct high level design and architecture. And the outcome of the design was then jointly planned to be executed with joint team of existing members from RB and Surya consultants. Some of the key benefits were:

  • Surya Conducted fixed price engagements for design & architecture
  • Surya provided Lead Architect and Lead developers for the project team
  • Surya was involved in managing resource plans jointly to ensure that the resources are planned in advance and utilised correctly
  • Surya team members were available to hire through our “Contract to Hire” scheme ensuring critical skills are available to be retained
  • Every consultant provided was pre-qualified by Surya to ensure that RB team does not have to conduct lengthy selection process.
  • Reckitt Team was trained and then learnt on the project

Challenges & Issues

Two consultants were not found fit for purpose culturally and escalations were raised to the account manager. We effectively replaced the consultants within 1 week.

The Program budget was difficult to manage due to many business units funding the program. We coordinated closely with the IS Head to ensure that the billings were organised per PO.

Some of the key technology decisions required “Proof of Concepts” to evaluate the right design / solution. And the infrastructure migration of the sites was also considered as not best utilisation of the team’s time. Surya stepped in and proposed to conduct them on fixed price basis since we had our team engaged on the ground to provide us knowledge.