What is One Build?

One Build is simply a strategy to move all major sections of the Sky Sports website into the responsive digrev framework.

Where we are now

After nearly a decade of development the Sky Sports website has splintered into multiple codebases and designs, resulting in significant costs to the business through duplication of effort and increased maintenance.

There are 5 builds of the site currently live as shown in the diagram below:

Benefits for the business

Efficiency

• Reduce costs
• Reduce effort and free up resources
• Faster turnaround of new functionality
• Speed up 3rd party implementations
• No more ‘big bangs’ — a continuing process of evolution

Innovation

• New types of features and interactivity
• More adaptive to change
• Lead rather than follow
• Scope for betas and a/b testing
• Better responsive ad opportunities

Quality

• Improved consistency
• Increased platform stability
• More time to improve quality
• Scope to create richer content

Benefits for our teams

Editorial

• Content enrichment across platforms
• Fast delivery of cutting edge features
• More time to support editorial innovation
• Consistent content delivery framework

Video

• Better UX across devices
• Faster implementation of 3rd party players
• Consistent approach to sign in

Social

• Better share capabilities across platforms
• A more user friendly site
• Faster implementation of 3rd party plugins

Product

• A platform for personalisation
• More time to spend on app improvements
• Faster delivery of projects

Marketing

• Flexible and consistent solutions across the site
• Cross-device opportunities explored
• Maximise mobile traffic

Sky Media

• Be at the forefront of responsive ad solutions
• Maximise revenue across devices
• Synchronisation of ad solutions and site development

Sky Bet

• Faster integration of widgets
• Capacity to A/B test proposals
• Consistent solutions across sports

Development

• Easier integration for new starters and contractors
• Smaller codebase to work with
• Improved site performance

Design

• Better position to drive Digital Review progress
• A chance to get ahead of our competitors
• Showcase the brand

Support

• Significantly less live bugs
• Reduction in investigation times
• A more stable site

How we get there

Focus

• The concept is a feature that will benefit all areas of the business
• Deprioritise new features and short term priorities in favour of overall value of a ‘fixed’ skysports.com
• We want to be proud of our website and get ahead of the competition — for the first time in many years, we now have the opportunity and need to seize it

Team work

• Every department, scrum and product owner need to work together towards the same goal
• Shared responsibility and transparency of the progress is fundamental

Discipline

• Aggressive MVPs aligned to responsive principles
• Work quickly
• Say ‘no’ in the interim but absolutely ‘yes’ once we’ve reached our goal

Work yet to be factored in

• Cricket
• Transfer Centre
• Watch

Summary

As long as our site is not all on one single codebase, we’re costing the business time, money and resource while seriously compromising our potential to be the best at what we do. With technology advancing so rapidly and the business investing so aggressively in major sporting rights, collectively, it’s our responsibility to fix what’s broken and get our website in the place it needs to be — and fast.