Case Study - Conde Nast
About Conde Nast: Publisher of established magazines covering fashion, technology, food, and travel, including The New Yorker, Vogue, and Wired.
Achievement: See how an optimized work process can not only turn something impossible into possible but also create a fantastic result.
Background and Challenges
April 2010, Conde Nast, a client of Vision Critical urged Vision Critical to launch its five web projects earlier than expected. Each project was composed of three parts: a website, online marketing collaterals and a discussion forum. Their typical work process for a project had one designer taking care of it from start to finish for the purpose of consistency. The turn around time to complete one of those projects was two and half weeks. Although there were three designers available in total, it would take nearly one month for all three people working together solely for this task. Conde Nast wanted to get it done in four weeks; however, it was unrealistic to drop all their other work. Impossible!
Solution
Just before the manager was about to renegotiate with Conde Nast to push back the deadline, Luque spotted something promising. Luque noticed that although these five projects were representing different products and services, the structure of the five websites and the constrains of each were similar. Thus he suggested to take advantage of this similarity by reforming their typical way of work.
Rather than breaking this big task into five sub projects as usual, Luque's plan was breaking the task into three pieces such as one piece for websites, one piece for marketing collaterals and one piece for forums. Luque was in charge of creating all the websites and coordinating the work process, one designer took care of all the marketing collaterals, and another designer was accountable for all the discussion forums. Using this method, some of the HTML, CSS, and script code could be easily reused as a kind of a "template" for the other sites once the first piece of website, newsletter and forum was completed. Also, because that the same designer focused the similar work, it was much faster to reuse their own code.
Achievement
Without dropping other requirements, the five web projects were successfully completed within three and half weeks that was even shorter than the client originally anticipated. Conde Nast was so pleased that it sent a big "thank you" letter to the team. It may seem to be intuitive to change the work process afterward; however, when a company was so comfortable with its past process that path dependence made it very difficult to explore new ways of doing things, therefore, thinking outside of the box became particularly valuable.
Case Study Nonde Nast