I’m writing this somewhat after the fact (given that I’m already fully working on the 2015  version of the site) however this does provide an opportunity to reflect on last year and what turned out to be a very successful project for IE.

2014 was the year we got the Agile process much more fully embedded into the way our cross-company team worked. Whilst we still had a number of areas to improve upon (planning remained a weak spot) at least we were much stricter with our process and timings. From my perspective this was by far the smoothest year to date, we delivered on time and on budget, although not all features that Movember had originally wanted. Here too the Agile process was able to identify potential production issues and we were able to transfer the team’s energies into the highest value work.

We were able to scale up the front-end team (with a particularly fine bunch of freelancers) at just right time to turn around the creative as it was getting approved – the basic groundwork having already been completed by our superstar Italian new recruit Franco Zaniol. It worked brilliantly, the team scaling up to 13 developers at one stage, but always productive. Velocity continued to improve until the end of the project. Validation that Agile can work on even the most challenging projects.

Overall Movember were very happy with the result, the site was much more ready to hand over to the Movember business than it has been in previous years, and this was greatly appreciated – giving Movember’s content around the world more time to hone the content…

In terms of the new features we did roll out, they included:

• Overhaul of Mo Space UI
• Rebuild of the Sencha Mobile Website (after the ‘difficult’ 2013 version)
• Introduction of Kiss Metrics across the site
• Redesign of Registration
• Implementation of Twitter Bootstrap framework (groundwork for moving the site Responsive in 2015)
• All new ‘Mogress’
• Introduced more regular site features to T2 and T3 countries
• New Front-end theme
• Suggested Donation amounts in the Donation form
• New Report Cards section
• Extension of the Events section functionality
• Introduction of back-end Jobs and a Queuing system (ie. to handle processing of email notifications etc.)
• …and many more smaller updates.