Development Strategy

A UK Publishing House

THE CHALLENGE

With increasing and varying demands for enhancements to the clients IT systems, the internal development teams were struggling to cope. With many systems written in specialist languages, finding contractors to help support the teams was proving difficult. The CIO needed a better picture of the likely future demand for developers and an understanding of how the development teams could be better utilised.

THE APPROACH

Qedis were engaged by the media organisation to help them articulate their current development roadmap and strategy, and to help them understand the different strategic options available to them in terms of development activities. Working closely with the senior IT management team, Qedis reviewed the clients development strategy and assessed the likely future demand for systems development from the business. This was done through interviewing the current teams, documenting the current workloads and development tools, and assessing the current view of future activities. The business was also interviewed to understand their requirements and future expectations. From this work, a Development Roadmap was produced, clearly showing the challenges faced by the development teams in terms of resourcing numbers and skill sets.

With the future demand and expected challenges on the developments teams understood, an options paper was produced in conjunction with the client CIO. With cost and effort analysis, this paper presented various strategies available to the client. This included outsourced development, replacing core in-house systems with off the shelf packages, and restructuring the current teams to make better use of the resources available.

THE RESULTS

- Development Roadmap in place, allowing the client to better plan its resourcing and to proactively manage business expectations

- Options paper providing a clear understanding on how the client might meet future demand. This included recommended outsource development teams that the client could use to supplement its current teams when needed

- Clear understanding of the technological challenges involved in maintaining in-house systems based on old or obsolete languages. This work contributed to the clients later selecting to phase out some of these core systems with more modern alternatives