Implementing A Continuously Improving Promotional Products Division

How we partnered with a promotional products company to create highly flexible, client-specific UIs as well as client-specific product offerings and pricing rules.

Summary

The promotional products division of Staples services countless clients, all of whom require a customized product catalog. Staples needed a way to allow for highly flexible, client-specific UIs as well as client-specific product offerings and pricing rules. The many points of client-specific customization ultimately had to filter down to common rules that all other Staples apps could use.

How We Helped

Predictability

Integrity's team delivered a constant stream of information about project health throughout the delivery process. This enabled early communication about timeline variance, focus around outliers that were distracting from original goals, and the ability to more accurately set expectations with projections based on actual deliverables rather than estimates.

Team Communication

Integrity implemented a swarming approach to developing features, which is common in most Lean-Agile software teams. While this practice tends to be seen most clearly in the developer portion of a team, Integrity encouraged Staples' teams to share responsibilities for delivery across all areas of the features. This allowed Staples' teams to decide internally the most efficient way to deliver features. This also decreased the amount of time that the business waited for features to be delivered and increased levels of collaboration and trust within Integrity teams.

Architectural Oversight

Integrity provided leadership in Staples' effort to move to a microservice architecture, replace legacy systems, and move to a cloud environment. Integrity brought together individual developers, infrastructural resources, and IT leaders to build a consensus around the path forward and help teams stay consistent with those decisions.

Technical Consulting

Because Integrity has more exposure to current practices, it was tasked with many of Staples' new software endeavors. Even when not the selected team for the work, Integrity provided oversight or direction to other teams on their solutions. Staples used the knowledge gained from Integrity consultants to keep their system modernized to both their business users as well as development staff.

Flexibility

Integrity often has available developers who can be added to a team on a short-term basis and assist with immediate needs. This flexibility allowed Staples to keep up with the speed of their business needs without taking on the long-term overhead associated with hiring additional employees. They were able to keep up the high quality that their customers expected while bringing in the right solution for their short-term needs.