Transforming a Legacy System
Client
Our client is a membership-based resort chain with over 370 locations in 35 countries. Members pay an annual fee to have access to any of their timeshare suites, amenities, events, and excursions across the globe.
Challenge
The client initially hired Intego for basic staff augmentation and IT outsourcing needs. They required extra engineers to help their IT team update their internal reservations and reporting system, but Intego’s developers soon realized this wasn’t going to be as easy of a task as expected.
The main challenge was that the client’s large internal IT team was following the outdated Waterfall Model of software development, meaning they were taking a linear approach through project phases without routine team check-ins or regular progress updates. This meant making changes could be problematic as there was a lack of end-user involvement and testing was delayed until after completion. On top of that, the client had one Version Master who was in charge of manually integrating these individual pieces of work, which was incredibly time-consuming, inefficient, and left room for error.
Another challenge the team faced was the data regulations in place for the hospitality industry. The system Intego’s engineers helped to update handled money transactions and sensitive personal information for the client’s hundreds of thousands of members worldwide, so cybersecurity was of the utmost importance both during the actual update process and as a parameter for the updates themselves.
Solution
Recognizing the limitations the project faced, Intego’s software engineers spoke up about the Waterfall approach to the project and offered the client a dynamic solution. They proposed an Agile approach with a Scrum framework that incorporated daily team meetings, sprint planning, and various tools to support collaboration within distributed teams. Impressed with the recommendations, the client’s Chief Information Officer (CIO) visited Intego’s development centers in Eastern Europe to explore the proposed innovative solution further.
Included in this solution was a special framework that automated many of the Version Master’s manual tasks and intuitively discovered existing errors in the system, increasing the efficiency of the entire project and saving the client time and money that had been spent on manual updates.
To take advantage of these cost savings and system improvements, the client brought Intego Group on as a preferred consulting partner for the entire portfolio of projects.
Result
By trusting Intego’s expertise, the client received a completely updated reservations and reporting system instead of an outdated system with only some updated components. This new system was mostly internal, but it also had some customer-facing features. It helped the client to:
- Accept, change, and track reservations
- Monitor occupation rates across locations
- Handle money transactions safely
- Track existing memberships and accept new ones
- Create information reports for shareholders (At the time of this project, the client was a publicly-traded company.)