Wiggle, the world s favourite online cycle store, has pedalled its way from a single shop in Portsmouth to an international internet success.

Transcription

1 Wiggle Wiggle races towards growth targets Wiggle, the world s favourite online cycle store, has pedalled its way from a single shop in Portsmouth to an international internet success. As staff numbers grew, time-consuming IT admin issues were hindering staff productivity and distracting from growth. Working with CDG removed the IT roadblocks, allowing staff to focus on website development and enhancing the customer experience leaving Wiggle to whizz ahead once more. More>> 1

2 exec summary About Wiggle Starting as an independent bike shop in Portsmouth, Wiggle officially launched online in 1999, selling cycle, run, swim and triathlon products, worldwide. Wiggle retails more than 700 branded items despatched to over 70 countries, and employs around 400 staff in the UK and Australia. Challenge Rapidly growing tri-sport internet retailer Wiggle is aiming to double its size and revenue within 3 years. How could it boost staff productivity in order to make this aim a reality? Solution Wiggle realised that cutting IT administration workload was critical to enabling growth. Wiggle has removed roadblocks by offloading software development tool management and support to CDG. Benefit By working with CDG, Wiggle has cut admin effort, is able to fully exploit its software development tools, and increased developer productivity moving growth into the next gear. 2

3 challenges Rapid growth Committed to become a half-a-billion-pound company in the next 3 years, Wiggle cannot afford roadblocks to growth. Continued website development and enhancement are critical to Wiggle s success, but for the IT team, the management of the company s development tools were a continuing distraction. In addition, with both in-house engineers and offshore development teams in Minsk, Belarus, cross-border teamworking was proving more and more important. Rebecca White, Head of Delivery at Wiggle, explains: Our work requires a lot of collaboration between global teams. We were using software development tools from Atlassian on their cloud service platform, and knew that they offered a great way to manage our projects. We were responsible for maintaining the tools ourselves, and we found it difficult and time-consuming to resolve issues. As one customer out of many tens of thousands it was hard to gain access to high-level Atlassian support engineers. The cloud-based service offered very little customization of the tools, so we were limited in how we could actually use them, and we were not making full use of the tools capabilities. Maintaining the Atlassian environment was a constant burden on our development staff, distracting them from more value-added tasks, which wasted time and reduced staff productivity. Working with CDG Wiggle looked for ways to optimize its use of the Atlassian tools. At the time the tools included JIRA for planning, tracking, and releasing software, and Confluence, principally for centralized documentation and project management. Rebecca White notes, As part of Wiggle s growth strategy, we wanted to move away from self-built tools and self-maintained systems towards off-theshelf tools with support frameworks already in place. 3

4 discovery That way we can focus on the solution development we need to achieve in order to obtain growth, and leave the maintenance of the tool to someone else. Wiggle slected CDG to advise on the Atlassian toolset and how best to use them, so that it could truly get the most out of them. CDG not only has a wealth of knowledge and expertise around Atlassian products, but also recognises the importance of innovation, explains Rebecca White. The CDG team took the time to really understand our issues, what we were looking to achieve, and how best to enable our ambitions. Wiggle chose to move its Atlassian tools to the CDG ADAPT platform, a fully supported and maintained hosted solution that enables advanced customization and configuration. The ADAPT platform handles all the system administration, maintenance and management issues of an Atlassian environment, enabling Wiggle to focus purely on optimizing and maximizing use of the tools themselves. By switching to the CDG ADAPT platform we can do much more: we can enable complex, advanced workflows and cross-border teamworking, for example, says Rebecca White. At the discovery stage, CDG revealed that we could re-structure our Atlassian software licensing to cut our fees, and at the same time enable greater flexibility as teams join and leave projects. For example, we have a number of extra people on site at the moment to help us deliver a major project, and every one of them needs a licence to use the Atlassian tools. With CDG we can flex up and down with our licensing structure as necessary, making it far more cost-efficient. The ADAPT solution also offers greater control over user permissions management, allowing us to increase data security, and restrict or permit access through a simple management interface. Wiggle also felt that it lacked a high-level perspective of its software development projects. CDG deployed the Atlassian Portfolio tool to the ADAPT platform. Portfolio will empower us to plan and 4

5 knowledge forecast with assurance and make data-informed decisions, without having to resort to time-consuming spreadsheets. It shows us the bigger picture and the relationships between projects, helping us manage our growth strategy. Wiggle is working with CDG to determine requirements and enable Wiggle to gain the full advantage of the Portfolio tool. Boosting staff productivity Wiggle is reaping the benefits of working with CDG, optimizing its use of the Atlassian toolsets. By working with CDG we have an immediate point of contact if any issues arise, so they get resolved swiftly, comments Rebecca White. We no longer waste time trying to solve problems ourselves, and we can focus on value-added tasks. For example, we re using the tool during a current project - updating our customers My Account pages so that customers can self-service more tasks. The tools have been key to share information, create user stories, and understand workflows. At any one time, we can see exactly what feature is at what stage in the plan. In the past we viewed JIRA Software as simply an issue tracking tool but we ve started harnessing it much more fully in particular, it s been invaluable in helping the development teams to work collaboratively. The benefits are clear within the IT team and other business teams have been interested in adopting the tools and processes in their areas. The marketing team has asked us about how to use the tools themselves, and as more people start to benefit from the tools streamlined workflows and other aids to collaboration, we hope to boost productivity right acrosscompany. Rebecca White concludes: CDG allows us to take full advantage of the Atlassian tools without the burden of trying to host and support them ourselves. By eliminating administrative effort and exploiting the Atlassian tools more effectively, CDG is helping Wiggle to boost productivity allowing the teams to focus on Wiggle s growth strategy. 5

6 about CDG CDG enables some of the world s best-known brands and organisations to design, build and launch new services very rapidly and very cost-effectively. By reviewing current processes and workflows, CDG works with you to identify opportunities to enable digital services that serve your clients more effectively, increase your internal efficiency and open up new possibilities. For example, CDG works with Accenture, Bristol City Council, The Cabinet Office, Catapult Cell Therapy, The Department for Work and Pensions, The Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency, The Post Office, Sainsbury s, SpecSavers, Telefonica, Worcester City Council, Wiggle and many more, helping them thrive in the digitally enabled-world. To find out how CDG can help, contact hello@groupcdg.com Legals CDG CDG, Old Boundary House, London Road, Sunningdale, Berkshire, SL5 0DJ, United Kingdom hello@groupcdg.com Doc 20143/16 6