Replacing an ageing infrastructure whilst increasing revenue and creating a new internal team.
Digitally transforming Manchester Airport Group
Brief
How do you digitally transform an airport?
Manchester Airport Group (MAG) were in the process of hiring an internal team to modernise their digital estate. In the meantime, they turned to us to quickly increase revenue, set their engineering up in the right way and help them to build their new team.
In short, we were the interim experts who could make sure they set off on their digital modernisation programme in the right way.
Quickly increase revenue
We set up a series of workshops, audits, interviews and research reviews to discover the areas in which we could simultaneously improve their existing technology, give a high commercial return and improve the customer experience.
Design sprints and a programme of performance optimisation for each of the airport websites followed, where we worked in rapid cycles to develop and publish new user features and customer experiences, introducing a cleaner and modern new design and testing in the live environment as we went.
Armed with these insights, we formulated hypotheses and prioritised these based on evidence and value.
Set up engineering in the right way
Implementing a loosely coupled architecture on the new site allowed us to make isolated changes faster.
This meant we could scale easier, validate hypotheses quickly and change out parts of the site without the need for major rebuilds.
No matter what changes in technology, market or customer behaviour are ahead, MAG now has the ability to respond and adapt.
Helping to build a team
MAG-O, the group’s new digital division, was simultaneously growing its team while initiating this fast-paced digital transformation programme.
Over the course of nine months, we swapped out our team members for new hires which meant that the transition to the internal team could remain flexible.
In this time, the strategy, communication cycles, ways of working and roles were defined.
Results
The up-skilled MAG-O team are now entirely self-sufficient and were able to do this at essentially no cost due to the concurrent optimisation programme which increased revenues as we went.
They have a technical roadmap for the next 5 years, modern engineering and operating frameworks and more profitable, better-looking sites.
