The Situation

• The AA needed to improve the performance of the eCommerce Sales Journey. Sales performance is very sensitive to small changes in journey flow, screen layout, visual design and display rendering speed. The existing journey was starting to constrain sales performance and the client needed to make a step change

The Task

• Lead a £3 Million IT Driven Change Project visible to the Main Board and VC Owners from start up to customer Go Live and hand over to operations
• Organisational: Business Case Mgt, Budget Mgt, Stakeholder reporting for multiple levels of seniority, defining delivery approach, Planning & Scheduling, Mitigating high level risks, Forming and leading The AA delivery team, Integrating a 3rd party supplier into the delivery team, Routines to establish delivery stability, transition to production and operations
• Commercial: Refresh the Sales Journey Visual Design, migrate customers from the existing to the new journey without reducing sales performance, roll out to all retail new business sales channels
• Technology: Introduce new application technology, develop new code to replace aged code, ensure code quality through all phases of testing, take a step towards automatic testing and continuous development, achieve a technology deployment without interrupting customer service

Actions Critical To Success

• Deeply understand The AA context, project purpose, desired outcomes, business case and budget 
• Leading the team to ensure focus on the most significant activities not the distractions
• Interpersonal relationships including forging a strong partnership with The AA staff which was vital to understanding and delivering a successful commercial outcome
• Integrating the 3rd Party Delivery Team into The AA's ways of working
• A delivery approach that blended Scrum Code Delivery, Phased Testing, "Big Bang" Production Deployment and a Gradual Customer Migration
• Attention to the detail for Risk Management, Scheduling, Dependencies, Budget and Reporting

The Result

• Record sales achieved in the first 3 months after implementation
• Closed within 10% of original budget set 14 months earlier
• A gradual customer migration that was closely monitored to limit disruption to sales revenue
• Reduced complexity in the code base, reduced operational down time and reduced complexity for simple content changes
• Delivered change across all retail new business sales channels such as organic traffic, pay per click traffic, bespoke discount sales, affiliates and affinities