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Case Study: Thomson Specialist Holidays Group
Amethyst responsibilities: Project management, web-site design, content management programme management
The project: Thomson SHG Web Development
The timeline: August to December 2004
The deadline: Implement a number of re-designed fully bookable web-sites before systems freeze December 15, 2004, in time for peak selling period January 2005
The concept: Re-develop existing specialist brand web-sites to a consistent look and feel; provide on-line booking using back-end reservations systems; implement structured content management for Specialist brands
The scope:
Project 1: Redevelopment of existing Thomson specialist web-sites to deliver on-line bookability against FSS and JFA reservations systems.
Working under Prince 2 project management framework; sites designed and delivered using DSDM (Dynamic systems development method) organisation and techniques, particularly in the areas of time-boxed, iterative design and review.
Activities included Project initiation, business unit briefing, facilitating requirements workshops; business requirements gathering and documentation in UML notation (esp. Use Cases, Sequence diagrams, activity diagrams); user interface design workshops and validation, developed via site maps, page wire-fames; specification and review of XHTML coded templates from external design house and W3C compliance checking prior to hand-off to internal Web Development teams.
Project 2: Content Management: planning and implementing the migration from a failing, outgrown CMS to the EPIC (Thomson corporate) CMS platform.
Activities included CMS current situation analysis, documenting current processes, process mapping, data analysis. feasibility study, package selection for replacement CMS Business requirements gathering for new systems and processes Functional gap analysis (old system to new selected product) documented as CSC Catalyst standard functional matrix.
Tactical content project: data cleanup, standardisation and migration within the existing AO-CMS environment (both technical and editorial) to support new technologies for Thomson portal architecture
Development platform: Open source front-end including J2EE, MySQL; legacy integration with back-end Reservations systems
Constraints: development within the design guidelines for Thomson Portal
Client staff: key stakeholders from SHG product teams
Development shop: in-house development team for core systems; external design house for XHTML template development (www.Chillifish.net), TUI UK Content Management team for CMS development; contract resource and external consultants for Tactical Content project.
