Digital Transformation for the RYA
The Situation
Digital Vision and Roadmap 190919 v3
The Royal Yachting Assocation has been around since 1875 but had been loosing relevance, members and relevance.
A key part of the issue was legacy tech, a lack of personalised / relevant content, poor data governance, a lack of automated processes and an absence of customer centricity, in a siloed traditional culture.
The Task
To resolve this untenable situation I was taksed to propose a new digital transformation programme bringing leading edge technology and systems aligned with user centred design and custom content.
I was asked to lead extensive user reseach and internal stress testing of the new approach and to creation new user personas on which our new services were based, in addition to this I was tasked to build out the project framework using Agile overseeing the internal development team and potential external partner agencies. This further involved identification of leading edge foundations using MS Dynamics, Azure Powershell and Sitecore XP.
Alongside this I was also asked to lead the culture change workshops to enable a better customer focused culture.
The Action / Approach
I oversaw extensive benchamarking of best in class eco systems and processes having spent time with RNLI, Help for Heroes & Google reviewing optimal models
I then put out a detailed feedback survey to members, partners, wider stakeholders and private clubs about what they would like from us
Collating all this evidence I created an outline plan and roadmap to the board and senior leaders (based on MVP and an agreed porduct backlog
On approval I created both a specific project & outline sprint plan together with RACI, risk register and internal staff dependencies.
Once approved at kick off I ran a series of porduct focused workshops to bring together cross cutting teams and workshopped user stories onto Miro & Jira.
Taking a pool of wider senior stakeholders I led selection of external partners and vendors based on our requirements – using an independent systems specialist to help ensure no platform bias we selected Sitecore and support partners Isobar.
I then built out a cadence of regular reviews and sprint / Epic reviews with all parties – collating both the external work of Isobar but the internal development and migration work of my internal development team.
Following an Agile approach, with daily stand ups, retrospectives and sprint reviews we worked across a range of workstreams – legacy tech spin down, content migration, personalisation, data simplification (onto MS Dyamics) and Sitecore forms to drive new automated back end processes.
Alongside the tech and content innovation I also led change workshops to enable a better customer focused culture rolling out product focused (cross cutting) teams away from the traditional silo approach.
I also maintained regular check ins with our regulator, our audot and risk committee, baord level sponsor and commercial partners.
As the project delivered through its 3 main phases back up, mirror / dual run & switch over I continued to provide clear appraisals of work done (reporting plan versus actual) ensuring contingency plans were in place at each phase.
Post launch we heavily monitored user feedback and I contually reveiwed post MVP backlog
The Result
Stopped membership decline with an initial 8% growth
Grew engagement by 21%
Grew new experience sign ups with commercial centres by 50%
Saved over £100k in legacy technology
Enabled up to £2 million in partner activation using personalised content mechanisms
Ensured the long term future of the RYA whilst bolstering its cyber credentials
