Implementation Planning

SITUATION

Public relations and media asset management is a critical function of any media and entertainment company. Via the Media Village website, NBC Universal provides highly influential users with access to a library of its metadata and media assets in varied sizes, formats, and codecs.

Sourcing, culling, and distributing these materials are well-understood work streams within NBC Universal’s daily operations. However, creating digital access to such rich content can present unique interactive, storage, caching, and security challenges. In an effort to refactor the previous interface and enhance its overall usability, the Media Village team created a new site concept with business-line specific branding and enriched content that needed to work seamlessly with the in-house content management solution and technical infrastructure.

SOLUTION

Prior to implementation, digital strategy and planning exercises go a long way towards ensuring on-time and on-budget project execution. Digital Foundry and the team from NBC embarked on an interaction mapping workshop to clarify dependencies, formalize requirements, and complete robust task flow analysis. This collaboration covered the identification and refinement of new features, solution design around the inherent technical challenges involved in managing and moving large files over the web, and web service definition and modification.

This process yielded a project plan that was comprehensive, realistic, and well understood by the diverse parties on the implementation team. Ultimately, the planning workshop was key to minimizing time to market and mitigating project risk.

RESULTS

The planning phase—particularly the collaborative workshop—enabled Digital Foundry to:

• Learn, evaluate and analyze - Digital Foundry met with NBC technical leads to learn and evaluate the existing CMS service structure and provide analysis of existing gaps and associated feature dependencies.
• Refine feature sets - Digital Foundry consultants helped adjust and refine features where necessary to accommodate existing technical structure and provided feature alternatives to help streamline scope.
• Improve website performance - Digital Foundry technical leads discussed and selected new architectural pieces to help improve website performance.
• Smoothly transition to implementation – Digital Foundry’s implementation plan and architectural recommendations allowed both teams to smoothly transition from requirements identification to implementation in a matter of weeks.