Case Studies
Clients
American Booksellers Association
American Booksellers Association is a not-for-profit organization devoted to meeting the needs of its core members of independently owned bookstores with retail storefront locations through advocacy, education, research, and information dissemination.
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Client:
American Booksellers Association
Technology:
Solaris 2.7 Platform
J2EE Architecture
Oracle 8i Database
Netscape App Server 4.0
EDI: ECXpert
Veritas, Toplink, F5 Big IP
Industry:
Non-Profit
Service:
Strategy & Program Management
The Challenge
The American Booksellers Association had engaged a large integrator to build their e-commerce application. The integrator had spent 10 months on the project without identifying a workable solution. The ABA had made commitments to their members based on promises and status reports from the integrator and was forced to go back and communicate the application would not be ready for the promised launch date.
The ABA engaged the Ironworks team to perform an assessment of the project and evaluate the application being built. Our review resulted in the following items:
Lack of formal agreed upon functional requirements for the application
No robust design principles
Lack of trust between ABA and the integrator
Lack of a formal development methodology and poor project leadership by the integrator
The Solution
The Ironworks team took control of the project and committed to an aggressive launch date in order to allow the ABA to demo the new site and application at their annual conference.
A project team consisting of senior level PM, Engineering, DBA, and QA associates was assembled.
All application code development was suspended.
A formal and effective application development methodology was subsequently executed.
A comprehensive set of functional requirements was created and agreed to by the client.
A formal application, database, and architecture design was completed.
Application and database coding for all functional components of the site was successfully completed and thoroughly tested.
By the launch date, the application was ready for the demo at Book Expo and received great praise from ABA members.
The Results
The Ironworks team enabled the ABA to renew the trust that their members had placed in them by delivering a quality solution on the promised date. By building trust with the client, following a proven methodology, and bringing senior resources to bear, this critical project was recovered and successfully delivered.
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