Getty Images

Helping a fast-growing Web team work together smoothly

After a number of acquisitions, Getty Images Inc. had become the largest international provider of visual content to advertising, publishing, and design professionals. The company's Web development team had consequently tripled in size with no systems engineering support or internal processes-and the internal IT team was too busy to help.

Resolute helped the Web development team set up efficient internal processes. Our consultants also researched, designed, and implemented an installer to address application deployment.

The Challenge

Getty Images turned to Resolute to solve two problems. They needed an outside resource to analyze the systems engineering requirements for the Web Engineering and Design teams, then serve as the acting systems administrator until the role could be transitioned to Getty Images staff. In addition, with the size and geographical diversity of the new Getty development team, collecting and installing code onto a server was taking far too long- up to three days in most cases. The busy development team couldn’t address the problem, so Getty Images asked Resolute to create a more efficient way to deploy applications over Getty servers.

The Results

After their analysis of the current environment and platforms, and interviewing project leaders from the database and development teams and the IT group, the Resolute team determined that a lack of systems engineering roles was the source of a range of problems like inadequate documentation, no key lines of communication, no core ownership, and insufficient network infrastructure knowledge in the Web development team.

Resolute helped define roles and responsibilities, recommended specific support processes, and set up interaction among team leads and the IT group. Resolute also automated setup and configuration of the development and test environments.

Resolute assisted the IT group in the critical deployment phases of the product, and recommended that Getty hire two systems engineers to support the development and test environments to ensure that all operational procedures and security were included and maintained in the development process. Resolute Resources filled those two systems engineering positions for nine months, and then helped recruit and hire permanent engineers.

To address application deployment issues, a lead developer and a systems engineer from Resolute researched, designed, and implemented an installer for Getty Images. Using Microsoft Windows 2000, Microsoft Windows Installer, and Microsoft Visual Source Safe, Pacific Solutions automated the code upload and report generation processes, trimming the once 3-day ordeal to a seamless 2-3 hour process. Resolute completed the project in less than 12 weeks, including testing and documentation.