Initially founded in the Netherlands back in 2010, Backbone International has been providing its services as a management and technical partner for the clients that are in the business of creating, organizing or financing events. Led by the ambition to maximize its impact and cover the global market, Backbone established additional offices in North America, China and Indonesia.
The Brocoders team managed to build advantageous long-term partnerships with Backbone International. Since June 2018, both our teams have been working hard to collaboratively create a top-notch solution that could reshape the Backbone working environment, while guaranteeing rock-solid safety and top quality of the provided services.
The situation
You might end up with challenging tasks when managing and planning several events that sometimes happen to be held in the same month or even week. To stay out of the curve these days, it's vital to stick to state-of-the-art technology that can take the lion's share of time-consuming tasks from your to-do list. Such an approach, in turn, lets you focus on more important business goals.
As a technical production company, Backbone International required a robust solution that could help in planning, organizing and executing events of any type in a highly efficient and timely manner.
That said, Brocoders was approached by the representatives of Backbone to develop an all-in-one platform where every team member could monitor the schedules, understand what and when should be done to deliver a high-quality service.
To come up with a custom-designed product that meets all the client's requirements, we started with several workshops in the first place. During the discussions, we managed to define our priorities as well as the scope of the core app's functionality:
- Develop a tool that makes it easy to create and share schedules among the Backbone team.
- Allow for managing the data regarding suppliers, clients and attendees involved in the production.
- Make it possible for the team members to work with the event schedules based on their authority levels.
- Provide both suppliers and clients with an insightful, easy-to-use tool to smoothly monitor their schedules.
Working process
To investigate the market and analyze a bunch of crucial data, we engaged our on-site business analysts from the very beginning of the project. We employed the iterative development methodology to allow for easier testing and debugging, as well as to ensure the project's viability and changes flexibility.
Backed by the discussed and documented requirements, we created a high fidelity prototype to eventually come up with a multi-functioning and easy-to-work-with platform.
Based on the Scrum model, we provided our partner with small increments every two weeks to acquire invaluable feedback. Driven by such a client-centric approach, we could stay on the same page with the Backbone team throughout the entire development process while enabling seamless improvements.
Key challenges
According to the most crucial tasks set before us by the client, we had to empower the solution with the following features:
- Full-fledged visual displaying of schedules.
- Possibility to create an event with a basic description at the first stages.
- Adding/editing/deleting main activities for each event.
- Team members can combine activities in groups in case these are similar or repeatable during the event. Custom logic for the groups of activities is provided.
- Effective management of additional activities that should be performed by the exact supplier.
- Displaying the order of all added activities.
- Displaying the type and scheduled time of the equipment utilized by every supplier.
Besides, we had to develop a user-friendly design concept to provide a clear, insightful and eye-pleasing scheduling interface for all parties at the same time, hence ensuring the outstanding user experience. To accomplish this task, we assigned a project manager and a UI/UX designer to the project.
Our team
To cope with all the field-specific challenges, Brocoders assembled a self-motivated team of seasoned professionals with years of software development expertise:
Frontend developers
Backend developer
Product designer
QA engineer
Project manager
Once we covered the MVP stage and acquired approval for the proposed design concept, we moved on to evaluating the scope of work, after which the major features and tasks were split into milestones. Based on our business priorities, we ended up with three milestones eventually.
Our Services
Technology
Delivered solution
The Brocoders team developed a reliable feature-rich platform for managing numerous schedules and activities during the events of any type and size. We provided full-cycle maintenance starting from the initial idea to product-market fit to the final phase of customer support once the product was launched.
Thanks to the agile-related frameworks, our dedicated team managed to comply with deadlines while meeting all the customer's requirements and needs.
The client received a powerful web-driven platform to streamline the primary workflow while other users ended up with hassle-free tools that let them monitor and facilitate their business goals during the events.
- Users can automate and simplify a planning strategy with easy-to-use dashboards that can be shared with other stakeholders.
- All users can enjoy a comfy in-built transport schedule.
- The Backbone team members can access a summary page that contains full-fledged data on every event activity or program (one single page for one single event).
- Users can only access and receive the information they are authorized to by the event provider.
- The Backbone team members, along with suppliers, can check and monitor the data regarding the equipment or machinery that is utilized during the event.
The results
To date, more than 20 events are managed via the Backbone platform, where about 90 suppliers take part in different activities required for a successful organization of various events across the globe.
At the moment, we are planning the next iteration and the scope of work for another milestone. Based on the end-users' feedback, we now have a list of additional features designed to be added in the upcoming versions.
Driven by a client-oriented business approach, we are eager to help Backbone International keep up with the times by enriching the existing solution with some extra features. It is our primary goal to ensure that our partners can reach the best possible outcomes while delivering fascinating services that users love and enjoy.