Assisting The Office Group with international growth

Their challenge

As an ever-growing business with plans to expand into Europe, The Office Group has to be able to implement digital initiatives quickly and iteratively as the business scales. The website, which is key to attracting new customers, and which serves as TOG’s virtual shop window, was failing to grow in line with this need. 

For instance, a simple task like updating a phone number, adding a new office listing, or updating brand elements across the site was complex and time-consuming. It was taking multiple weeks and requiring duplicated effort across various parts of the site. 

Furthermore, their old site could not support multiple languages was therefore a barrier unfit to fulfilling their international growth plans.

They needed a new platform urgently and it had to be:

• Easy to maintain, providing an enhanced workflow for site administrators
• Easy to update and scale alongside the business
• Offers multi-language support 
• Offers ecommerce functionality and support
• Open source and flexible
• Competitively priced

After conducting strategic analysis, The Office Group identified Drupal 8, the open-source, fully-featured content management system (CMS), as the ideal platform for launching its new website.

The team then approached Inviqa to deliver a compelling MVP (minimum viable product) website that would serve as a platform for business growth.

What has been done

We helped The Office Group first define a blueprint for action by working with the team to develop a prioritised digital roadmap that supported TOG’s digital strategy and business goals for their site.

This informed the development of an MVP Drupal 8 website which was developed in an Agile, iterative way. We made effective use of Sprint Zero – an initial sprint used to quickly produce backlog items, a minimal environment for coding, and the code to kickstart development.

Inviqa and The Office Group have a shared value of using evidence instead of assumptions, and we both also emphasise learning and experimentation. That’s why we focused on the delivery of a compelling MVP, using usability testing and A/B testing to gain insight into how users were interacting with the site and how it could be enhanced.

We focused on simplifying workflows, from providing a pattern library that enabled the frontend to be easily repurposed as well as introducing an Acquia digital asset management (DAM) solution that allows content editors to no longer manage and organise imagery in spreadsheets.

The implementation of Acquia Lift, a personalisation tool optimised for Drupal, will be key to helping The Office Group deliver engaging, in-context, personalised content without the need for any technical expertise.
 
In-person collaboration was key to truly embedding ourselves within The Office Group team, and our user interface (UI) specialist was based on-site with the client to provide ongoing support.

Results & achievements

The Office Group has now got a fast and flexible site that can grow in line with the business.

Changes that would previously have taken weeks to implement can now be implemented in a matter of hours, and the introduction of flexible, reusable components means that both administrator and development workflows have been massively streamlined.

The new platform supports multi-language sites, something that will be vital as the business looks to expand internationally. In addition, support for commercial functionality provides the flexibility to introduce features such as the ability to book and pay for meeting room spaces via the site.