6 sites in 60 days
The dev teams at 24.com have done a phenomenally good job of moving all the hosted newspaper sites off our old Vignette V/6 platform and over to our own custom publishing CMS.
Shortly after we launched News24, the targets for the next series of sites were unveiled… and they looked extremely challenging!
The brief was to build an afrikaans version of News24 called Nuus24, and to accelerate the move of all our newspaper sites to the new platform, including Beeld, Die Burger, City Press, Sake, Volksblad and Rapport. And to do it all in just 60 days.
There were some grumbles from the team as this new plan was detailed within 48 hours of the News24 launch. The launch had gone smoothly but it had been a stressful exercise and the culmination of many months of planning and development.
The team-leads and project manager took a closer look at the new plan and worked out that it was achievable, committed to the dates, and proceeded to hit every single target thereafter, without any serious problems and no launch rollbacks.
I had little to do with the details of these launches, which is even better – it shows that the team is capable, empowered, and able to deliver high-quality work on target again and again.
We’re not quite out of the woods yet – we’ll shortly be launching a migrated and touched-up version of the Women24 site, and then in the next 2 months moving Food24 over to the new platform and launching the first version of a new Games site while we’re at it.
Not bad – 10 site migrations to be launched between June and November 2009, and deadlines met or beaten for all 7 delivered so far!
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