Helping relevant news travel faster

Creating value through better tracking

Our customer, one of the leading companies in the content automation field in Germany, has a long background working with major global publishers and corporate enterprises needing implementations of new technologies into their organisations. They reached us because their tech department was having issues with a tool that manages publication content. The tool was using deprecated tech and the company was no longer able to maintain it. Since our customer’s business is mainly directed towards digital publishing and media, they saw the relevance of keeping the tool application. We redesigned this existing product with newer, updated tech so our customer could keep tracking news stories in the most cost-effective way.

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The bright idea

The tech department of our customer reached out for our help. The tool had been written 10 years ago in PHP and no one in their internal team knew exactly what the functionality was. On top of that, it was very difficult to maintain. After studying the tool carefully, we suggested writing the project from scratch. They needed developers with strong frontend skills who could do this and this is exactly what we offered. Our first step was entering the planning stage for the new tool’s replica and our task consisted mainly in setting the frontend using Angular.

The inevitable challenge

Before executing a client project it is important to clarify the requirements, making sure the customers know exactly what they need. In the first phase of the project we asked lots of questions about the product. This made both our customer, and the publishers they work with, realize they first had to replan the project. We shortly delayed its start and focused instead on drawing a deeper understanding of how to make it useful for all interested parties, be it our customer, the media, publishers or editors.

After closing questions and researching optimal solutions, we organized a planning and estimation meeting where we broke down the tasks for the first phase of the project. This first phase consisted of building the UI, including all different views and components. After this was done, our customer would show it to the publishers and ask for approval or needed changes before proceeding with the functionality. After setting the base, the continuity of the project was left to our customer’s developers.

So how did it go?

There was great satisfaction in the tickets we managed to create after the initial replanning and also how much it progressed once the actual development started. Our ticket estimations were accurate and we created a strong foundation our customer’s department can build on. Thus we ensured the continuity of the project and set a good base for its success.