British Olympic Association / Team GB :: Technical Direction

I was at KitKattNohr Digitas, a top global Digital agency that’s part of the Publicis Group, to bring technical leadership to a range of private and public websites for the London 2012 Olympics, Team GB and the British Olympic Association (BOA). I am heavily in all areas of the Olympics based projects, from board level discussions with KNDs new merger-driven management team (Paul Kitkatt / Mark Nohr), to working with and overseeing creative’s, writing business and technical documentation, helping manage budgets and project burn, dealing daily with the client on a range of technical and non-technical issues, managing self appointed and client appointed third-parties, recruiting and managing developers, both in house and remote, and even managing to find the time to write some great code and offer inspirational leadership! The 6 websites are all built using Drupal 7 and leverage the advantages of a multisite Drupal configuration. Additional modules, including Organic Groups, Views, Mollum, WYSIWYG and Backup, are used and great care was taken to ensure the stability and maturity of these modules before signing off their acceptance within the build. The responsive grid-based theme framework, Omega, was chosen for the project predominately for its native support of HTML5 but also because of its liquid design principals and graceful degradation. Traditional (‘waterfall’), agile and prototyping build processes all used within the project and all the project management was done via MS Project and Jira.

The websites built for the Olympics were:

  1. New main website for the London2012 Olympics (www.olympics.org.uk)
  2. A secure Athlete Accreditation Site
  3. Campaign Micro site for ‘Join Our Greatest Team’ campaign that also featured advanced Flash
  4. Private partner-facing Olympic Pledge site for all Olympic sponsors employees
  5. A community and forum based site for the friends and families of Olympians
  6. A video driven ‘welcome pack’ site for UK athletes who have been selected

* All sites had an accessibility implementation of Double A, and graded browser support to include IE6. ** Mobile and IOS support was also included.

Below is a brief summary of my work:

  • Heavily client-facing. I was the single technical contact point for the multiple projects, my role included the presenting of ideas, board level discussions and multiple technical and business-related meetings
  • Researched and agreed the requirements for a bespoke sports based CMS for both web and screen based (offices, Olympic village etc) content during the 2012 Olympics that enabled two communication from athletes to the public and the public back to the athletes
  • Conception of ideas with creative’s and identifying technologies to enhance the sites functional creativity and overall stickiness (like using databases to create rich immersive comment driven digital walls in the athletes village)
  • Third party technology provider discussion, evaluation and leadership including ePlayer, Movergy, GBSports TV, InfoStrada, YouTube, AnchorFan, Gigya and Getty
  • Installation, configuration and evaluation of social networking and DMS technologies (open source and commercial) for use within the campaign elements of the site.
  • Technical meetings with other relevant organisations  like the IOC and Locog and sponsors like BP, Mini, Cadburys and TechnoGym
  • The facilitating of widget-based API, MRSS and RSS based data sources for real-time content
  • Dealing with Rackspace, Amazon and Akamai and identifying and arranging suitable cloud servers, load balancing, content delivery networks and security
  • Full content audits of legacy Olympic sites by Haymarket and Cisco.
  • Mitigating against loss of data, establishing ownership of the  different types of data, the selection and installation of SSL and arranging for Penetration Testing by a ethical hacking organisation
  • Writing test scripts and organising internal and remote QA
  • UX, Wire-Framing, Mind Mapping and Prototyping

In addition other work I achieved for KitKattNohr Digitas includes:

  • Helped instigate process and working methodology within KitKattNohr Digitas by meeting with all key directors and identifying concerns (Accounts, Planning, Project Management, Creative and Tech)
  • Interviewing and hiring of technical and front end staff including high-level Drupal developers
  • Working closely with Graphic Designers to ensure maximum leverage of liquid designs, the responsive grid and limit ‘over design’ at early stages of the project