Agile Shelf-Edge Ticketing Platform for Marks and Spencer Plc.

Marks and Spencer had an urgent business requirement for a new shelf edge ticketing solution, for which several previous projects had failed. It was subject to a number of severe and conflicting constraints:

• A tight deadline concerning a change of food sale regulations, coming into force right in the middle of the Y2K change freeze
• No existing development platform capable of delivering an agile solution to M&S stores, and no appetite to enable one during the freeze
• No available database accessible from the stores
• Very limited bandwidth for new solutions and data. I had to design to a limit of less than 100 kByte per store per day!

I designed a solution which met the very tight deadlines, used roughly 1% of the previous communications bandwidth, and exploited the existing Microsoft Office/Exchange infrastructure to deliver substantial functionality without any new components at the desktop. The solution reduced a key business process necessary to keep goods on sale from over 14 days to a few hours.

Over the next two years the design was substantially extended in scope, including multi-country and multilingual support. Complex business and formatting rules were moved from code to a rule database, and the system migrated to a component-based architecture.

While I acted as lead developer, I espoused and put into practice my strong belief in agile development practices, which delivered value progressively from a team with widely-varying development abilities.

Marks and Spencer cited me as co-inventor (with the key business manager) in a patent application covering several important concepts from this system, and I continued to provide consultancy for its development including the later development (in just ten days) of a working thin-client version of the system using Microsoft .NET technology.