This software company was set up to market, develop and support websites for staff benefit communication and simple self service HR functions, within the SME sector. Their product supported both fixed and flexible benefit administration schemes, total reward statements and also holiday booking administration functions. It was marketed in three ways: direct to employers, via an IFA reseller channel, and also to licensees, who were typically HR benefit consultancies. Licensees developed websites directly for their own clients using the same underlying proprietary technology, and sharing the production website hosting service.

I was head hunted as a result of the sudden resignation of the Operations Manager. My interim role as Chief Technical Officer was to lead the product development, product engineering and project management teams, who supported the underlying proprietary benefit communication website development product, and built and supported individual employer websites. The main objectives I had on joining were:

• to replace key technical staff, who had just left to form a spin off software company
• to double operational staff within 12 months, to match projected sales
• to stabilise the recently developed .NET release of the product
• to improve productivity so that client installations could be completed within 2-3 days
• to complete the project to outsource all production website hosting

The tasks I completed over my 24 month assignment included:

• Recruiting a complete Microsoft .NET development team
• Expanding the operational staff from 12 to 18
• Stabilising the holiday booking functionality within the product
• Ensuring that the FSA pensions calculator worked correctly and that it was compliant
• Transferring all remaining production websites to a more robust external hosting environment (Attenda)
• Agreeing and documenting the product sales and support charging structure
• Launching a pre-configured version of the product which could be installed in 1 day
• Introducing requirement, design and testing stages to the development procedures
• Improving performance and security to meet requirements of larger clients
• Redesigning the Staffcare database to improve flexibility and reduce cost at scheme renewal
• Designing flexible benefit website for a major new client, integrated with HR system
• Creating the Staffcare security policy and outline business continuity plan
• Developing the product release strategy to support the licensee and IFA reseller market place
• Designing and implementing product release 4.5 which provided improved security and extended Toolkit functionality
• Designing release 4.6 which supported flexible benefit administration for a major HR consultancy licensee and better performance
• Designing release 4.7 which launched a Group Pension portal for IFA resellers, with XML communications to pensions providers
• Recruiting my successor and handing over

Managerial: As the company expanded, the operational team evolved from a largely technical function into a multifunctional group, with a support, training and project management capability, as well as a fast site delivery function. When the sales emphasis switched to the licensee model, the need grew for a more sophisticated and robust core product and the development team was doubled in size. In addition, operational processes were improved.

Commercial: The same product was initially sold to SMEs in three markets, which provided early growth and later stability of demand. However, as the user requirements for the product became more sophisticated, the product was tailored and specialised for each marketplace. As income was mainly related to the client’s number of employees, the commercial need was to market to, and be able to support, much larger companies through the licensee channel.

Technical: The product was initially targeted at small organisations with a few hundred employees. It was decided to develop a proprietary data management system to improve flexibility. However, exploiting this flexibility proved to have a high implementation cost, because sites were designed for each client, even though the smaller ones would have been happy with a standard website application. Additionally, this design proved difficult to scale to sites with thousands of employees, and performance needed to be improved. A more natural data model was designed, better aligned with the benefit communication and administration application, which will be rolled out to all clients within the IFA and licensee marketplaces.