Background
With revenues of over $42 billion, this customer is a global communications leader that employs over 69,000 employees worldwide. The customer's mobile devices division has the vision of transforming the device formerly known as the cell phone into a universal remote control for life. Faced with a growing backlog of mission-critical projects, the division strives to rapidly produce innovative software products that meet the business requirements.

Challenge
The customer's community Web site was a concept for a new customer-facing online application, but in order to gain the internal support necessary to fund the project and drive it forward, project management had to adequately communicate project definition, scope and roles and responsibilities for application design and development. The mobile devices team needed to develop a visual method for communicating the project vision to customer IT as well as an external vendor in order to bring the concept to reality.

Result
Working with the customer's internal marketing manager, iRise created a visual simulation of initial pages and navigation for the proposed application before content and advanced functionality were determined. The marketing manager was able to use the simulation to facilitate a series of meetings with key stakeholders, developers and the vendor to forge a comprehensive, common understanding of requirements and dependencies.

With the iRise simulation, no assumptions were made as to "who was doing what" on the project, which gave stakeholders a high degree of confidence. According to the project leader, simulating first in iRise reduced the overall timeline by four weeks. Without the simulation as a visual blueprint, the number of meetings and communications required to achieve the same level of understanding would have taken 2-3 times longer – and cost the customer an additional $60,000.