For more information about Luxoft, visit www.luxoft.com www.luxoft.com/travel-aviation/
case study 10.10.2012
Luxoft Applies AGILE Expertise to Help Hotwire Drive Car Rental Revenue up by 15% with Continuous Innovation that Increased Conversion Leading Online Travel Engine Reorganizes IT Resources and Taps Long-Time Outsourcing Partner, Luxoft to Increase Capabilities of its Car Rental Vertical
Summary With business booming and online traffic increasing, Hotwire made the strategic decision to complete reorganize its IT resources to align them directly with their business verticals: Hotel, Car, and Flights. As part of that initiative, Hotwire also wanted to transform from the traditional Waterfall method of software development to Agile for increased speed-to-market. Luxoft awarded “IT Outsourcing Project of the Year 2012” for its partnership with Hotwire Inc. by European Outsourcing Association
uu Client: Launched in 2000, Hotwire.com is an award-winning discount travel site that negotiates deep discounts from its travel suppliers to help travelers book unsold airline seats, hotel rooms, and rental cars. Hotwire is an operating company of the world’s largest online travel agency: Expedia, Inc. (NASDAQ: EXPE)
Challenge Luxoft needed to deliver against six aggressive business goals while ensuring no disruption to the daily online activities of Hotwire’s business and customer experience.
Why Luxoft? uu Five years of ongoing, successful collaboration with Hotwire uu Agile and industry expertise uu Commitment to and alignment with business goals uu Financial stability uu Proven track record
In 2010, when global online travel aggregator Hotwire, Inc. made the strategic decision to reorganize its IT resources to align directly with its three major business verticals, Hotel, Flight, and Car, they were confident that Luxoft was the right software development partner to meet the needs and objectives of the Car vertical. Hotwire first started working with Luxoft in 2006 on a Test Automation project. After years of steady collaboration, proving their expertise, commitment, financial stability and record of success, Luxoft’s offshore team of talented software engineers collaborate to achieve even more of Hotwire’s project delivery objectives. This impressive pedigree, along with the fact that Luxoft is the leading provider of Agile software development services in Eastern Europe, made Luxoft the logical partner for Hotwire’s Car Team.
Luxoft - Case Study
02
Online Traffic Jam: Hotwire’s Increasing Car Rental Business Requires Big Changes Processing over 10,000 reservations daily, the Hotwire Car business delivers more than $600M annually in gross1 bookings . Unfortunately, the traditional Waterfall software development project model was no longer able to support the real-time consumer demand. By leveraging Luxoft’s experience in the Agile methodology, Hotwire successfully made the transition to a lean development model that met and exceeded their business objectives: uu Expand Hotwire’s delivery capabilities to meet business need uu Increase revenues by improving car rental conversion rates uu Strengthen product and industry knowledge among the car team members uu Reduce development costs uu Increase the project speed-to-market while reducing business risk uu Perform continuous measurement and evaluation of critical success factors uu Fuel innovation with change management practices that deliver business impact
Roadmap to Success: Luxoft’s Three-Stage Implementation Plan Beginning in November 2010, Luxoft ensured a successful transformation from the Waterfall model to the Agile model by focusing on three main tasks to facilitate the adoption of the new development model: 1. Establish a Dedicated Team Beginning with a team of just three engineers, the current Car team headcount is eight professionals who cover different areas: back-end and front-end development, business analysis, quality assurance, and Scrum coaching. As the project progressed, new roles were introduced to support the distributed team: uu Proxy product owner uu Onsite project coordinator uu Dedicated technical vertical owner
1
Luxoft - Case Study
Source: Smith Travel; Auto Rental News. 2010 forecasts
03
2. Transition from Waterfall to Agile To help Hotwire adopt the Scrum methodology in November 2011, Luxoft developed a transition plan that allowed the team to realize its benefits without negatively affecting productivity or workflow. Agile workshops for the client and vendors were conducted in November and a go/no-go decision deadline on the on-site transition was set for December. In the early months of 2012, Luxoft’s Agile coaches conducted the offshore transition and it is now successfully in operation. 3. Delivery During the transition period, the Luxoft team maintained its high level of service delivery to ensure there was never a negative impact to the business. Always going above and beyond to deliver real innovation that exceeds client expectation, Luxoft proactively made numerous profitability enhancements to the system, including: uu Redesigning the car rental site’s result page uu Adding pre-paid retail inventory and additional car types uu Optimizing requests to Global Distribution Systems, decreasing the cost of information by 30% uu Consolidating the billing path By all accounts, Hotwire is delighted with Luxoft as their partner in this important initiative. According to Roman Kaplun, Director of Engineering Services at Hotwire, “Luxoft constantly demonstrates a strong level of commitment and responsiveness, and close alignment to our strategy and goals.” “Our success on the Hotwire Car Team is another example where the partnership has helped our business move to the next level in Product Development and delivery,” he adds.
Luxoft - Case Study
04
Best Practices + Innovation: Key Factors to Exceeding Expectations A key factor in Luxoft’s engagement with Hotwire was an unwavering focus on the transformation of processes and the development of industry best practices. Using workshops, onsite visits, and with a commitment to managing personal development, Luxoft and Hotwire realized the benefits, including: 1. Product and business knowledge ownership and management within a dedicated team uu Developed specialists and subject matter experts to collect and manage the business knowledge base uu Maintained a strong focus on soft skills and attitude to engage top talent and develop a self-organized team that is empowered to drive change uu Created a respectful work environment, without the restrictions of hierarchy and bureaucracy, that promotes professional growth uu Developed a shared product vision through workshops and Sprint Zero uu Maintained a strong and open collaboration, based on mutual trust and high morale 2. Scrum agile development methodology in use uu Time-to-market decreased dramatically uu Smoothly integrated Scrum process into existing release schedule uu All Agile best practices were solidified with the supervision of Luxoft’s Scrum coach uu Continuous improvement and immediate feedback from customers with regular Sprint retrospective meetings 3. Efficient communication channels uu Streamlined communication and mitigated the time difference between the offshore and San Francisco teams with the proxy business owner in place uu Onsite coordinator to facilitate cross-team collaboration 4. Focus on Quality uu Continuous integration uu 20% of time in each sprint is spent for “technical debt” uu “Stop & Fix” approach uu Performance testing is done by a dedicated team beginning at the development phase uu Support of production and debugging of production incidents is done by Luxoft’s team, reducing the effort and loss of productivity for Hotwire’s employees uu Executable requirements using Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) Test Automation tools (Cucumber, Selenium) to encourage collaboration with non-technical stakeholders Luxoft - Case Study
05
In addition to creating best practices, Luxoft employed several innovative approaches to achieve the business objectives: uu Created the role of proxy business owner in Kiev to bridge the communication gap in the time difference between teams uu Led concurrent team training in Kiev and San Francisco, with a dedicated Scrum coach for 6 months uu World-renowned Scrum coach Jeff Patton was retained to give the teams his innovative Scrum practices, story mapping methods, and product discovery techniques
Project Results uu Decreased business need delivery time by 300% (2012 vs. 2010) uu Increased speed-to-market by 300% (2012 vs. 2010) uu Increased car rental revenues by 15% by improving conversion rates uu Strengthened product and industry knowledge within car vertical team members
“Our success on the Hotwire Car Team is another example where the partnership has helped our business move to the next level in Product Development and delivery.� - Roman Kaplun, Director of Engineering Services at Hotwire
Luxoft - Case Study
06
About luxoft
Luxoft, a principal subsidiary of IBS Group, is a provider of advanced application and software engineering outsourcing services for global and regional enterprises. Luxoft builds partnerships with its clients, such as Boeing, IBM, Deutsche Bank, UBS, Harman, Avaya, Alstom, and Sabre, based on the culture of engineering excellence, innovation, and deep domain expertise. Luxoft offers international delivery capability through its network of state-of-the-art delivery centers in North America, Eastern Europe, and Asia. Luxoft`s customers benefit from the right mix of technology skills, industry knowledge, proprietary processes and methodologies, and a choice of engagement models. For more information about Luxoft, visit www.luxoft.com www.luxoft.com/travel-aviation/
Š 2012 Luxoft