One year looking back: The journey of welcoming BENELUX into Veepee.
This article has been written by Barbara Schael, Tech Co at Veepee.
A few years ago, Veepee started a transformation to expand their market within its core business and converge other regions into a single platform. The first milestone was successfully achieved in January of last year, by switching millions of Spanish & Italian members to our new platform.
Now we were ready to proceed with the next chapter, this time welcoming our BENELUX customers into the Veepee stratosphere.
As a project, it not only implied the migration of customers and being GDPR compliant, but also processes, responsibilities, company switch and a new set of GAP features to maintain business continuity… and of course, the best mindset to be able to make the jump after almost a year of hard work.
This time around, we had a team consolidation within the vpTech world — our beloved product & techies — that are the ones that makes our job easier, a defined methodology and our Veepee values, we were able to take on the world… without its difficulties of course 😊
Knowing the goal and from the Tech Coordinator perspective, I wanted to summarize some steps that we face over the project, that at the end, helped us — spoiler alert 🚨 — to succeed in doing so!
Step 1: Figure out what you can and cannot live without…
In project management there is a very familiar concept of The Triple Constraint: a triangle that includes our Scope, Time and Cost. These three cannot live without each other, and as a great partnership one or two needs to compromise in order to balance the other and not break.
This principle was also applied to our project. We knew the Time and the Cost were not in a position to move, so we had to play with the Scope. Keeping in mind that we wanted to give the most value for our deliverables within the timeline.
We sat down with our customer, in this case the business owners at the Veepee group level and at the Regional level , and — through the GAP analysis and some iterations and prioritations — we validated the list of must-have features that were necessary to maintain business continuity after migration. Which we were confident to deliver with the time and resources.
💡Methodology tip: This was accomplished by documenting the tech assessments and having a single source of truth of the requirements. And cannot stress enough on the “one source of truth” thing 😉
Step 2: Work on a Roadmap… and commit to it
Our next step was to translate these “must-haves” features into a Roadmap. Roadmaps are a powerful tool in project management because it helps to focus, remind the priority and see the next steps of the project.
In order to secure those deliveries, we committed with the teams to a weekly follow up to check on progress, doubts and next steps. Also, facilitate any tool or meeting to clarify the requirements and any necessary changes.
💡Methodology tip: Having a high level consolidated document to keep a unified backlog, issues/open topic reporting and any end-to-end test request helps to keep track on things.
Step 3: In any migration, there is always data migration
This project was about platform migration. So Data migration was sure on the list.
I was a first time migration coordinator — I was excited to learn so much from the process. Here is what I took:
- Limitations: We checked the legal constraints and followed the best practice to move from one platform to the other.
- Requirements: Not all data should be migrated for the sake of it. We pushed for defined requirements to migrate what is necessary and leave the rest behind
- Strategy: We prepare a well defined plan: create a contract, test and iterate. All this to be ready for the deadline.
💡Methodology tip: As much as we need to be legally compliant, we need to agree on the business impact that this or that could have on the migration.
Step 4: Test as much as possible before making it LIVE
I know, I know… it seems super obvious, so let me elaborate.
Best practice before releasing a product is to have the proper quality assurance check, user acceptance testing and demo at the end. But in this case we wanted to go one step further and set up a two phase Beta test.
For Phase 1, we invited business to create scripted scenarios that include the business cases important to them to validate in the release. Then we selected a group of testers to reproduce and give their feedback.
For Phase 2, we invited our full employee community to test. We asked them to see what we cannot with a couple of tests, to identify what was missing — like a button here, a link there — and provide it through a centralized slack channel that included a feedback workflow.
This feedback was reviewed, filtered the issues and prioritized them to be able to fix them before opening to the public.
💡Methodology tip: For us, Slack workflow automations was key 🔑. It was super easy to create a flow to gather feedback, but also to manage it afterwards.
Step 5: Is not over until is over
Approaching the day to move to the new platform, we were ready. We had almost a year to develop, test, change processes and prepare for best and worst case scenarios.
But we knew after January 11th, 2022 — Migration day — we still relied on the methodology to keep track over the issues that might arise and how the customer activity performed.
We allocated this time with the impacted teams and made a priority to finalize this last phase of the project. At the end, we were able to tighten all knots and help the new customer continue their path through this new platform.
💡Methodology tip: KPIs are key to understand performance, define them before going live and keep a recurring meeting: first, to validate expectations vs the reality and second, propose improvements over time.
In retro…
Product manager and project coordination plays a critical role in the platform migration journey. It is a time consuming process that involves a clear goal, a methodology and willingness of the teams involved.
It requires a great amount of grit (passion + perseverance!) to roll out the migration project to a success.
