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This week, we traveled to Toronto in order to negotiate with our primary Content Management System (CMS) vendor, Razorfish. We all know what the Agile Manifesto says about “Customer collaboration over contract negotiation“, so don’t get me wrong, I’ve never been a huge proponent of contract negotiations, but even I’ll admit that sometimes it does seem like a bit of a “necessary evil”. Particularly when certain vendors aren’t necessarily will to “play ball” or “come to the table” to collaborate and work to find mutually beneficial solutions (won’t name names right now, but HINT, its definitely not Razorfish!)

ALC initially started working with Razorfish back in 2015 (when they were still called Nurun before rival larger digital interactive agency Razorfish acquired them) on the “Corporate CMS re-design project”, which aimed to upgrade and migrate the entire “corporate.playsphere.ca” sub-domain’s content over to a modern enterprise CMS, namely, Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) which ALC has chosen as its corporate CMS. Of course in November, 2016 even larger rival firm Sapient negotiated an agreement with Razorfish to merge, creating a somewhat “super digital interactive agency”. (UPDATE 2020-02-18: and perhaps at the borderline “disturbing” scale, Publicis then acquired the Sapient-Razorfish — SRF for short — conglomerate, creating a frankenstein’s monster digital interactive agency with few remaining significant rivals for the big contracts, this entity now called “Publicis-Sapient-Razorfish”).

Since then, quite a bit has changed, as there were a number of “pillars” in the Darwin programme (collection of projects), which made it the single largest undertaking in ALC’s history according to most in-the-know who I’ve spoken to, coming in at a whopping ~$35 million total estimated cost. Whereas AEM was initially selected to replace only that “Corporate” part of PlaySphere, it has since been selected to replace the entire PlaySphere system (particularly the front-end portions), and provide a number of vendor integrations. This is because only the “Corporate takeover” portion of the Darwin programme was actually on track.

The Darwin portfolio of projects rather ambitiously aims to simultaneously rejuvenate and completely replace both our legacy PlayShere system and a very large number of its vendor integrations, alongside our Retail systems, part of our Call Center technologies, and, a number of other supporting systems that are expected to get small updates. Of particular contention are those myriad of 3rd party APIs we need to support and integrate, each provided by vendor partners, and needing to be consolidated in a number of ways. The aim is to reduce the total number of vendor touchpoints (vendors needed to be contracted with), Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) providers, and, other similar agencies/consultancies we need to work with and/or get support from.

As I shared with my team, I’m happy to report it was a very productive jam-packed 2-day trip. Most importantly, they’ve tentatively agreed to move their code repository for the Darwin project’s new AEM-based ALC.ca replacement for our prior PlaySphere system from their internal Stash (BitBucket Server) instance running within their network, and where all our codebase currently lives, over to our own BitBucket Cloud instance. They will also move away from using their JIRA Server instance as their “source of truth” for all tickets and issues, to instead using our JIRA Cloud instance which we have been using for over a year now. We’re aiming at mid-to-late May at the latest to get these cut-overs done, it will be alot of work to first test out “mirroring the repo” between instances and exporting then importing all the JIRA issues. All agreed though, to pull this off at least one additional trip would be recommended, to bring more of the team up to Toronto next time in order to “observe their day-to-day Agile methodologies” and which pieces of that we may want to bring into our new team as it grows. Agile will be a new thing at ALC in general, so I want to be really certain we “get it right” (and yes, I realize there is no such perfect combination right out of the gates, rather we need to just start somewhere and regularly evolve/tweak it as we go). However, towards still trying to have some kind of plan together, I always love referencing this meme:

After what I’ve seen so far, and my past experience at other companies, we will likely end up adopting some kind of hybrid of Scrum and Kanban. I am hearing that “Scrumban” term more and more, so we’ll see how that goes. Scrum seems like a great fit for project implementations, while Kanban seems like the no-brainer choice for all our enhancements, bug fixes, and “keep-the-lights-on” (KTLO) types of development activities.

With our current plan, its looking like we’ll finally launch one full year behind schedule in September, 2017 some time (that’s without true Agile so far, more like an “incremental Waterfall” approach so far, mostly due to vendor limitations and nothing spelled out in our contracts about how we want to and/or expect our partners to work). I’ve been told the September date is not negotiable and can’t slip no matter what, but also the famous like “September is a long month” (an inside joke reflecting the FUD). Will do what I can to prevent such a large set of initiatives and projects to ever need to be cobbled together again, and instead hopefully we can just do a great job maintaining this new AEM platform, so that all we need are little feature delivery sprints and minor projects.

Leading up to September, 2017 we will be collaborating heavily with the SapientRazorfish team, bolstering our current team of 5 with their 15+ active Developers (although with a tapering down towards eventually only having a few of them remain for at least a year in a support role during the “warranty period” as we call it, post go-live). The plan from our launch date onwards will be that our team slowly but surely ramps up to full capacity to be able to support the web application and Mobile App webview integrations that have been done within AEM totally by ourselves, and, to continue to build on that with various other business project, enhancements, internally drive innovations, etc. It will be an interesting challenge, and we’ll see how it goes.

UPDATE (2017-09-17): We finally launched the darn thing, and it wasn’t even the last possible day of the month as many expected! What a whirlwind the past nearly two and a half years have been (feels like I’ve done about 3-4 years worth of work myself, and I’m certain that if you add up all the person hours on this project including OT and “extra efforts” that went into getting this beast across the finish line, you’d come to like 100+ years of life force spent). But I can finally show off the new look of the webapp:

Example authoring, to choose which Components are allowed within a given Static Template in AEM:

Feeling lucky? Give it a try yourself now, at https://www.alc.ca