IK Outdoor - BBM

Challenge

Abandoned, unfinished and out of date features, lack of remote work support, security issues, infrequent updates

Solution

Provided complete collaborative project management, missing features were implemented or patched up, ongoing maintenance

Results

Improved client satisfaction, faster delivery, decreased maintenance costs

"After a few previous attempts, it was You who put things on the right track, and finally finished the tool our colleagues are using now on a daily basis with complete satisfaction"

— Tamás Bauer - CEO

What is BBM?

IK Outdoor offers a complete administration of planning and buying public space marketing campaigns for their clients. They had an outdated custom software for handling campaign administration, which no longer adequately met their current demands (supporting remote work, improving the security of the customer-facing UI and user experience).

We started our work with IK Outdoor at the end of 2017, when they contacted us to asses their development of a new campaign-manager software, which was an on-going project of 1.5 years already, without a working solution or an end in sight.

What made this project special is that there was already an on-going development but was lacking in multiple aspects. Regardless, after a discussion with IK Outdoor, we proposed to keep the existing version and to incrementally fix the glaring issues, as this approach would be more efficient both cost- and delivery time wise.

The project is currently live and being used in production by ~20 employees of IK Outdoor, and by their respective customers as well.

IK

Our Services In The Project

1. Project management

The first step was to establish a proper project management approach, where we recorded the known issues and missing functionalities of the project. Afterwards, together with the customer, we estimated and planned the tasks that were required for the go-live version.

2. Software development

We insourced the development version of the new management software and completed the development of the application; we still provide on-going maintenance, bug fixes and new feature developments as well.

3. Support

The current version is running in production and we handle all support requests: this includes a fast response time for resolving technical issues that might pop up due to bugs in the software or its external systems.

How The Team Works

All aspects of the development are done together with two representatives from the customer’s side; this collaboration happens on the shared GitLab instance where our customer has full access to their project as well. Some highlights of the project development workflow:

  • We provide a dedicated core team who handles the ad-hoc workload of the project. We make sure that the same set of developers handle all incoming requests in order to ensure that they have the necessary business and project know-how.
  • We have releases every 2 weeks, which we plan ahead for 1-2 months, also done together with the product owners from the customer side.
  • We organize and handle releases of new software versions with the hosting provider of IK Outdoor.
  • We provide monthly reports with detailed accounting information.

Conclusion

Even though we had to achieve this by stepping out of our comfort zone and relying on a solution that was not in line with our development methodologies and standards, we are proud of the fact that together with IK Outdoor we were able to bring a software development project from uncertainty to a working solution with happy users in the timeframe we agreed upon!