Case Study: Custom project management solution

Client Profile

Earlier this year we had the opportunity to be part of a really exciting development services effort to develop an end-to-end solution for Organic, Inc.

Organic, Inc. is a digital marketing agency based out of San Francisco, California, and a true internet pioneer. To put it in perspective, Organic’s web address, Organic.com was one of the first 100 web addresses ever issued, they launched the first banner ad, and they designed Yahoo’s first brand mark.

[qodef_blockquote text=”We connect with consumers at their emotional core.  Use empathy to understand where our target is coming from, going to, learning their needs, desires, loves and hates. Find the insight that transforms great creative into exceptional experiences that incite action, influence decisions, and inspire consumers to click, engage, shop, share and come back for more. Then measure and learn from the results to come full circle and do it again.” title_tag=”” width=”100″]

We are truly honored to have worked alongside Organic for past 8 months; their experience in the internet industry, they passion for creativity, attention to detail, and appetite for excellence were key contributing factors to the project’s overall success.
Learning experiences like this one do not come by often – we are truly blessed to have been at the receiving end.

Project Summary

When it comes to digital content and marketing, Organic’s processes and methodologies are very collaborative in nature. Prior to the development of the new system, Organic managed client projects across several self-contained websites, which they referred to as “extranets”. These extranets were setup and configured by Organic’s IT staff and their content was maintained by the project or account managers. These mundane tasks, including user account creation and password resets were all processed manually. While these tasks were extremely simple to do, the solution was not scalable nor sustainable.

The ideal extranet application would present Organic and its customers with an easy to use, centralized, and automated project management solution, customized for the digital marketing business.
Simply put, the new and improved extranet solution would enable the following:

• Automated Extranet creation and management
• Highly customizable user interface, with “white-label” options
• Multi extranet, company, project and role segmentation rules
• A robust, role based access permission framework
• Secure rich media content management and distribution
• Secure video content management and distribution, with CDN (Content delivery network) integrations
• Team collaboration on assets, tasks, milestones etc.
• Flexible and secure and scalable user management , with Active Directory integration
• Integration with Organic’s Professional Services Automation (PSA)
• Robust, segmented and role-based Search across multiple extranets and projects
• Analytics and reporting integration
• Integration with other Organic assets, such as Organic’s blog, threeminds, based on the Moveable Type blog framework

Solution

Maxiom Technology utilized Agile development practices for the project in order to provide functionality in the hands of Organic staff for continuous and frequent reviews. The project delivery timeline was quite aggressive and Agile was a key component that contributed to the on-time, on-budget delivery of the solution.

Maxiom Technology Project Managers and Architects kicked-off the project onsite, at Organic’s headquarters in San Francisco,  with Organic’s stakeholders and during which time the feature list was reviewed and the high level project backlog was produced. The project back log was distributed across several one month Sprints. At the start of each Sprint Maxiom Technology and Organic teams would review the Sprint backlog and associated requirements documents and identify any gaps and/or missing information.

Maxiom Technology delivered the code and performed a thorough demo to Organic stakeholders at the end of each Sprint.  After the third Sprint which which represented a product beta release, smaller bug fix releases were coordinated with the client to provide quicker feedback loops with QA.

Results

Maxiom Technology delivered a end-to-end and feature-rich Client Extranet system using DNN Software as its base framework.
DNN Software provided a few of the required underlying technologies, such as security and permissions, multi-tenancy, theming capabilities and other APIs. In most cases, we improved upon the base DNN Software user experience and interface by replacing them with more appealing and easier-to-use implementations.

The bulk of the solution was delivered by designing and developing custom extensions, providers, scheduled tasks and skins.

Maxiom Technology plans on productizing a variation (Sans Organic’s digital marketing centric customizations) of this Project Management and Collaboration suite for the DotNetNuke framework by the 1st or 2nd Quarter in 2011. Drop us a note if you would like to preview the product in a live demonstration or if you would like more information on the product’s features and capabilities.