Maverick recently worked with an international standards publisher to help select a new technology partner to host their book and journal program. The work included developing a capabilities assessment, generating the RFP paperwork, and helping to evaluate the vendor responses. Upon identifying the preferred vendor, Maverick was further engaged to elucidate the key requirements for the new platform to form the basis of the minimum viable product (MVP), including back-office integrations, identifying core dependencies, and risks to the delivery of the preferred solution.
As part of the project, Maverick provided project management and business analysis support within an agile framework to determine internal and external end-user needs and information behaviours, to ensure that the platform configuration addressed the key business requirements and strategies.
Maverick’s approach to the project included:
- Conducting interviews and focus groups with key stakeholder groups to capture requirements as user stories.
- Documenting and refining requirements as functional and non-functional user stories, including acceptance criteria.
- Prioritizing the requirements back log and identifying key user stories for MVP.
- Identification of key success criteria for each user story.
- Capturing dependencies and risks (RAID log).
- Comparing the client requirements log with the platform capabilities.
- Capturing main process flows, alternative paths, and exception paths required for MVP.
- Evaluating cross platform requirements to identify potential cross over and interaction points.
Based on the work conducted during the discovery, Maverick provided best practise recommendations to achieve the client’s
overall aims, including prioritized requirements log; MVP; RAID log; RISK log; main process flows; high-level platform design.
The final reports proposed a solution that sought to balance the needs of the end users and internal stakeholders within the project confines of time, cost, and quality. The overall recommended solution was a blended approach to hosting and supporting the client’s digital estate requirement that was reliant on real time integration with back-office systems and “out of the box” solutions from the technology provider – an approach that maximized existing systems while delivering a much-improved user experience.