Technology partner for digital marketing strategy support
Itransition’s team has supported the customer’s digital marketing strategies and helped establish online presence for their 14 brands across the globe.
Context
The customer is a global manufacturer of alcoholic beverages with a large portfolio of global and local brands operating in dozens of countries. To build up the online presence and awareness for their brands, the customer was looking for a development company who would partner with multiple global creative agencies responsible for digital and creative strategies. This technology partner was to be in charge of digital asset development, integration, testing, deployment and maintenance.
Our background in delivering digital assets, supporting digital strategies, and partnering with creative agencies across regional teams and global markets was a decisive factor for the customer to choose Itransition as their IT consulting partner. Our team became responsible for technical support and supervision of the digital activities and global marketing strategies for 14 of the customer’s brands.
Solution
In order to support these digital marketing strategies, Itransition’s team closely interacted with geographically distributed teams and vendors. Within the collaboration scope, our team built, tested and maintained various types of digital assets:
- Promotional branded websites
- Content management systems
- Community management platforms
Process
Itransition was responsible for the full development lifecycle. As a technology partner, we were in charge of choosing the most relevant tools as well as suggesting the optimal ways of new features implementation.
To quickly adapt to the changing requirements and promptly react to the feedback, we utilized a hybrid software development approach: Waterfall for cooperation with the customer’s teams and digital agencies, as well as for requirements discussion and planning; and Agile for cooperation within Itransition’s team.
To keep personal user data secure, Itransition followed secure coding standards, ensured GDPR compliance, and conducted external security tests after code updates.
Collaboration
Within our responsibilities as a technology partner, Itransition interacted with geographically distributed teams, both on the customer’s and third-party vendors’ sides, the latter including digital agencies, a hosting administrator, vendors managing security testing, domains, and analytics.
Since each team relied on other teams’ deliverables, we paid particular attention to establishing effective communication between all the teams, in spite of being located in different countries and time zones.
Team structure
Each of the 14 brands was assigned a team with the following structure: the brand representatives on the customer’s side, a third-party digital agency, and the development team from Itransition. The brand team consisted of a brand owner and a technologist who was a mediator between the brand owner and the development team. Itransition’s team communicated with the brand team and the digital agency responsible for marketing strategy development and brief creation.
Project management
To manage collaboration in such a multi-team and multi-phase project environment, Itransition visualized project relationships and processes applying tried-and-true practices of account and project management.
DMU matrix
We utilized the Decision Making Unit (DMU) matrix to visualize DMUs within the customer’s team and the participating third-party companies. For each account in the matrix, be it on the corporate, business unit or project level, we ascribed project roles, relations, and importance levels.
Contact matrix
We established an interaction scheme between the customer’s and our teams to track the relationship level and compare it from Itransition’s and the customer’s perspectives. To solve possible relationship issues, we built the GROW model to zero in on each arising situation, explore possible options, and create a plan describing steps toward win-win solutions.
The RAG traffic light rating system
We used the RAG system to consolidate all the project’s status reports in one place and measure the project’s progress, indicate problems if any, take corrective actions, and keep stakeholders informed.
Project management documentation
| A project charter | RAID logs | Lessons learned |
|---|---|---|
| To define project roles, responsibilities, objectives, and stakeholders. | To log and monitor risks and issues, rank them by severity and priority, and lay out mitigation plans. | To document and analyze problem areas, solutions and their impact, to apply them in future phases. |
Communication plan
To visualize communication, we created a communication flowchart to define:
- Project status, scope, updates and performance
- Communication roles, tools and methods
- Communication requirements and stakeholder expectations
- Communication timeframes
Our communication flowchart also described the escalation process, communication directions, and communication frequency.
Results
In our role of a technology partner, Itransition powered 14 of the customer’s brands by supporting their digital marketing strategies that relied on the timely and efficient delivery of digital assets synchronized with the marketing campaigns.
The cooperation between Itransition and the customer is still in progress. Our team is delivering new functionality, running updates, and providing support and maintenance services.
