Allowing the switch from paper to electronic publications and greatly reducing operating costs
Executive Summary
Challenge: The client, facing increasing workloads in creating content-driven apps, opted to outsource a portion of their software development to manage it more effectively.
Approach: During our partnership, 70 people managed 15 concurrent projects for the client, providing web apps, back-office setups, system upgrades, QA, security, and testing services.
Result: The client shifted to electronic publications which allowed substantial cost savings. We provided quality solutions in multiple areas, including advertising, e-commerce, legal matters, and more.
Services we used:
Table of Contents
About the client
Delinian, previously known as Euromoney Institutional Investor PLC, is a global, multi-brand information business.
The company provides critical data, price reporting, insight, analysis and must-attend events to financial services, commodities, telecoms and legal markets.
Its headquarters are in the City of London, with additional main offices in Manhattan, Montreal, Hong Kong, Singapore and Shanghai.
Euromoney is listed on the London Stock Exchange and is a member of the FTSE 250 share index.
Business challenge
Operating in the fast-paced media industry means that Euromoney must regularly create new content-driven applications for its customers and employees. It was getting more and more difficult to handle the workload, therefore our client decided to outsource part of their software development.
70
people worked for the client running up to 15 projects at once
50
projects in total delivered for the client
Scope of work
We started working for Euromoney Institutional Investor PLC in 2009 with just four software engineers. In the course of our partnership as many as 70 people worked for the client running up to 15 projects at once. At the very beginning, we provided teams of different levels of expertise, managed by the client. However, in the following months, the team doubled, while its output multiplied.
We have implemented solutions in the following areas:
- Advertising
- Statistics
- E-commerce
- Legal Issues
- Social Bookmarks
- Business & Marketing
- Surveys & Questionnaires
- Web & Windows services
- Events & Meeting Planning
- Searching & Indexing
We implemented a kind of mentoring system, where developers and quality assurance engineers work closely together.
The workload continued to grow and more skills have been added to the team including: quality assurance engineers – nearly 20 testers, representing over a third of the team, developers responsible for web applications, back-office configurations, internal systems and upgrading software, security engineers and testing experts.
Our close collaboration brought huge benefits to both sides. It also helped to create the relationship, which worked effectively, regardless of different locations.
Communication as a key factor
In such a large project it is important that communication is open and regular, that’s why we constantly try to improve this process. The approach that proved to work best is visiting the client at the beginning of each project to fully understand the technical aspects and business needs.
Apart from emails, team leaders make weekly calls to discuss progress on different projects. In addition, there are frequent face-to-face meetings.
However, what is really worth highlighting here, is the fact that almost every member of our team has daily video calls with engineers from Euromoney, including those on the business side as well.
Main benefits of our partnership
- Keeping development costs down while delivering higher volumes of software, without any compromises on quality
- Access to competencies going beyond software development
- Modernised and streamlined applications due to the use of new technology and best practices
- Gaining a long-term, trustworthy software development partner