Toolkit — Sue-Leigh Palin

Project Overview

A petroleum company loyalty app had a lot of security issues, inconsistency between iOS and Android apps, and high spend with their original technology solution. We migrated them from soft-layer to Azure, implemented a new UI, implemented basic analytics, and launched their new summer initiative on time.

Business Needs

This project had many layers, with multiple as well as concurrent initiatives going on. The first being stabilization (reduced app crashes) and better security (reducing hacking breaches). Their loyalty application on android, and iOS had inconsistencies between the two applications, such as application crashing and user experience. The business was not able to tell what the customer usage stats were or what was causing the crashes due to the lack of any analytics tracking. In addition to wanting a new skin for their app, they also wanted to launch a new summer initiative that was n the same time frame as their past initiatives, but with different rules and experience.

Planning & Timeline

The lead architect, project manager, and I went on site for a kickoff with the customer. We created a roadmap and timeline of the 6 main changes that needed to occur to stabilize the product and move to a new stack. During our project kickoff with the customer, we set the expectations around meetings and sprint cadence for an agile plan of attack and agreement on timing of stakeholder involvement and frequency, the Scope of the work in the first iteration, and team expectations. For each of the initiatives, I created a section in a document with Key dates, primary stakeholders, goals, and users, which were unique to each initiative. I worked with the Project Manager to create a project plan in Smartsheets, showing what the 3 teams would be working on (back end, ios, and android) as well as grouped by the security fix initiative, reskin, and new summer feature launch, also showing dependencies and needs.

App Security & Parity

I mapped out the current system set up and flow, and the new proposed flow, as well as the application flows for tracking that all areas of the app were accounted for. Because there were fixes that needed to be done on the old stack, and work to be done on the new stack moving them to Azure, there was a lot of app parity across multiple back-ends, and two mobile applications. While the app was for the most part the same, there were two separate teams working at different speeds, so tracking various work at different stages, on multiple platforms, with multiple teams was a challenge. I used a tool called Project Aid for Jira formerly known as Jira Sheet tools) that could track the story completion in google sheets, but that also linked to the jira stories, and could auto update completion status for a wide view that Jira could not show.

Summer Initiative

The summer initiative needed to be launched during a certain time frame. Not only did it have to have the new reskin style, but also had new rules, since this did not follow the same rules as summer initiatives in the past. I worked with a 3rd party UX team, created a map of the new screens, and the specific wording the customer marketing team wanted implemented, and error messaging.