Southbank Centre: from followers to leaders

This is the story of the digital transformation of the Southbank Centre (http://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/) and how this organization passed from being digitally limited to becoming a digital leader in one year. The process included many internal initiatives, from building an in house development team (after depending on external digital agencies for years) to rearchitecting the internal processes to publish content in the website from anywhere in the content creation chain.

We will describe the work done and the challenges faced and how they shaped the end result. The team followed a strict agile methodology that kept everyone very focused. The whole process was decided to be "open" and after a radical experience working inside a glass-box, where the team met 100's of people who visit Southbank Centre, the team grew in confidence and decided to open everything up to the public - including their website vision, processes, thinking, designs, and even the development backlog.

This talk will describe the challenges, successes and failures of the process to become a digital leader after depending entirely on external agencies, and how it was done at SC.

The following areas will be discussed:

• Vision: why?
• Project management: strict agile everywhere
• Product owner and stakeholders: roadmap and product definitions within multiple stakeholders with conflicting views
• Design
• User testing
• Development: website development
• Business transformation: go live process and backend integration