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Barclays: Consultancy, Development and Management

link: Barclays Business Manager

Barclays Business Manager

The brief for the BBM product grew out of close and long-standing collaboration between Barclays Clearlybusiness and LShift.

The Brief

Clearlybusiness's objective was to provide useful services to their small business customers and LShift wanted to explore ways in which the Internet could be used to support traditional standalone software packages.

Out of these goals emerged the brief for Barclays Business Manager, which offers a range of business management software to companies on a subscription basis for single or multiple seats. The client's support was crucial during the planning phase of the project.

They were realistic about what could be achieved within the various constraints, and worked with our technical lead so that appropriate design decisions were made at the right time. The nature of the product itself made changes easier to manage - the subscription model provides an ongoing relationship with all the users, so issuing software upgrades was easy.

While several strands of development continued in parallel, we briefed an external testing agency to help ensure that the software would run on all the target operating systems. At the same time, Clearlybusiness were training their sales and customer support teams. As the software reached the fi rst customers we were completing server side development, and the project was delivered successfully despite its delicate time constraints.

The Solution

This product needed to be developed at a very fast pace. We started planning in 2003 with little more than six months to go before the first delivery date. The deadline was clear long before the detailed functional requirements were settled, so an agile development methodology was required. Breaking down design and development into manageable chunks and prioritising requirements according to DSDM's MOSCOW rules (for deciding which features a solution Must, Should, COuld or Won't have in each release) made us confident that we could deliver to the tight schedule. As members of the client's team and the number of third party suppliers with fixed development cycles changed, the flexibility of our team was tested to the limit. LShift had to be truly agile to have a chance of keeping things on track.

The Result

The product's releases have been well received - with thousands of core licences now being used. PCPlus tested it and gave it their Editor's Choice award. Customers appreciate the way the rental model helps them run a professional business from day one without a large inital outlay. The model also allows them to keep things simple at first, but leaves them the option to move to more sophisticated versions of software when required.

For version one of the product (May 2004) we developed the overall architecture, an innovative licensing and security model, a messaging system, payment gateway and a profile management system.

The software made available to users included:

For version two, launched six months later, we consolidated the SDK (Software Development Kit) that third party software developers use to customise their products for the subscription licence. We also introduced support for multiple seats per subscription, targeted messages and an online subscription management system for users. The software available in this version included:

In May 2005 we distributed a further version with the following software:

Finally, a cut-down version of the same release, from which users could easily upgrade to the full version, included the following:

Technologies Used

ATG Dynamo, Apache, Coldfusion, I-Planet, Interwoven, J2EE, JSP, Java, Javascript, Microsoft SQLServer, PHP, Perl, SMTP, SSL, Tomcat, XML, mySQL