Some of the world's most valuable companies and brands trust Fusion Marketing as their creative and implementation partner. Clients such as Anheuser-Busch InBev, Siemens, McAfee, CVS CareMark and Wild Turkey depend on Fusion to create compelling experiential, event, and social media campaigns, performance solutions, and print and web marketing. One way Fusion keeps their clients ahead of the curve is to closely track developing cultural trends and technology so they can be first off the block to take advantage of emerging opportunities.
One recent opportunity Fusion foresaw was that a confluence of advances in data analytics, game mechanics, social media and mobility had created significant potential to improve the performance and analysis of sales incentive, customer loyalty and employee recognition programs. They decided to create a "Performance Solutions" platform that would support advanced analytics and predictive modeling, micro segmentation and communication, accessible from any device.
Fusion turned to WWT as their strategic partner to help identify the appropriate technologies and architecture for their new Performance Solutions platform. WWT was brought in at the inception phase, utilizing its core agile processes, to lead a collaborative approach between business and IT for requirements gathering, system architectural design and product roadmap. As Brad Harris, Fusion Marketing's VP, Interactive Technology said,
"We selected WWT for their breadth of knowledge in technology, from custom development to packages and open source tools. But just as important, we selected WWT for their strengths in agile processes and development."
The engagement started with a series of stakeholder interviews to organize and translate Fusion's established business goals and objectives into detailed platform features and requirements. WWT facilitated a number of game-storming sessions to develop user personas across market segments. The initial information gathering process, in turn, helped guide the creation of the proposed feature set, including web and mobile mock-ups.
In parallel, business requirements were mapped to technical components, tools and APIs, which were categorized into functional groups. This allowed Fusion to see how alternate road maps and various feature sets would impact cost and timing.
In utilizing an agile approach in the platform inception phase, we were quickly able to provide Fusion with a number of well-documented options to move forward and help Fusion's Executive Committee approve the development phase.
"WWT's agile approach manifests not only in their software development practices but also in partnering with their clients. We intend to leverage this approach with our clients as we move forward with a new platform" says Chris Galloway, Fusion Marketing SVP and Performance Solutions Practice Leader.
The project is now successfully underway with a combined team of WWT and Fusion Marketing developers.
