The CEO of a leading European mobile operator wanted us to conduct a free ‘proof of concept’ before committing to a paid managed service. He set me the challenge of having a live Formula One mobile information service up for the first Grand Prix of the season less than two weeks away!

Draft and agree client Agreement that committed client to long-term contract in the event that the Proof of Concept (PoC) proved successful.

– agreement of success criteria

– build agree commercials for longer-term contract

– scope technical and operational requirements for longer-term solution

– develop and deliver low-risk / low-cost technical solution for the PoC.

Lacking an immediate data content feed, I worked with software development to build a manual data entry front-end to our CMS platform. I had an ISDN line installed at my home office, connected two laptops to this, and with a colleague, watched the a TV broadcaster’s ‘free to air’ live race coverage & manually entered driver status and race information into the platform.

The CEO was very happy, and, before the following Grand Prix signed a two-year contract for us to deliver a suite of mobile information services – based on automated content feeds licensed from official providers.

The client gained a number of benefits from this successful project delivery:

– PR coup versus local competitor operators.

– increased revenue and reduced churn from existing and new customers