Platform Selection

Our approach does vary, due to the bespokeness of how we work with clients, but these projects would typically include at least some of the below:

• Business workshops / discovery - focused on understanding business goals, short, medium and long-term objectives, team structure, commercials and budgeting, and existing situation.

• Functional workshops - focused on capturing detail around requirements and documenting more technical areas. The goal would be to build a detailed spec that would provide detail to assess platforms and allow for an accurate quote from agency partners. This would also include discussions around things like integration approach, headless vs non-headless, role of key third parties etc.

• TCO analysis - assess the total cost of ownership (CAPEX + OPEX) against all shortlisted platforms. We’re very diligent in this area and factor in short, medium and long-term change covering internationalisation, impacting payment provider, exceeding GMV brackets etc.

• Platform assessment - assess the different platforms against the business and functional requirements and then report and present back against key areas to key stakeholders.

• Platform decision - process around committing to the platform and building out next steps.

• Agency selection and due-diligence - we’d typically run workshops on agency options and go through pros and cons. We’d then create a shortlist and agree a process for assessing and then reducing down to a final two. We’d often manage the selection process, but that’s very much optional. We’d also assure key areas such as cost structure, project team, UAT definition, contracts, agreements etc. We’ve worked with a high proportion of the mainstream SIs in Europe and the US and would also add additional layers of due-diligence.

• Project planning - we’d then optionally be involved in pre-discovery elements (e.g. commercials) and then we would be potentially involved in the planning of the project (internal and third parties), alongside delivery (project management, technical governance, QA / UAT).