At the end of a remarkable decade, we are celebrating the end of an equally remarkable year at Wattle. 2019 marked the 4th year since our shift from digital agency to creative software company, and saw the emergence of Wattle as a major player in the provision of technology solutions to organisations in the third sector.
Wattle Senior Management Team (left to right): Luke Fletcher (Head of CRM), Ross Nesbitt (Head of Development), Grainne Blake (Head of Projects), David Abraham (Managing Director), Andrew Vance (Commercial Director), Kelly Abraham (Finance Director), Rich Worrall (Client Service Director).
Wattle are now truly aligned to the needs of the third sector, and membership organisations in particular, which is reflected in the success of our flagship solution – MemEx.
MemEx is our membership experience platform which provides the foundation for a seamlessly integrated website CMS and CRM platform, enabling organisations to attract, engage and retain more members.
MemEx is built within the powerful .NET framework with Microsoft Dynamics as the stable -foundation and Umbraco as the user-friendly content management interface. MemEx sits at the core of the solution, providing a powerful, feature rich portal with every function your members might need. This includes event management, professional development, personalisation, self-service, business analytics and many more.
It is the combination of these sophisticated membership features and proven technologies, paired with the industry knowledge and expertise of our delivery teams, that makes MemEx the best accelerator solution on the market for membership organisations.
Our people are what makes our success possible, which is why we pride ourselves on investing in continuous training and development.
In 2020, we have plans to attend leading industry events such as Umbraco Spark, Code Garden, Umbraco Fest, Product Tank, Memcom 2020, Tech Spark and MEMX 2020 as well as a host of other events, to continuously improve our knowledge.
The development of individual employees will continue to be a strategic priority, with key investment in training programmes around the latest technologies and project delivery methodologies. We will remain at the cutting edge and deliver the best possible results for our clients.
We are immensely proud to have people working within the business who started as apprentices and have progressed into senior roles.
With major growth comes the opportunity to evolve and develop new and existing capabilities.
Rich Worrall, formerly of top 100 digital agency Great State, joined Wattle as Client Service Director. Rich is the driving force behind Wattle’s continued focus on ensuring our clients technology investments continue to evolve, adapt and improve.
Luke Fletcher, formerly of highly respected CRM consultancy Wizard Systems, joined the team as Head of CRM. Luke is blazing the Dynamics 365 trail and ensuring Wattle’s team of CRM Consultants remain at the cutting edge of Microsoft’s technology stack.
We also added additional capabilities to the business in the form of new recruits for Quality Assurance, Marketing and UI/UX to help our clients optimise online user experiences.
We pride ourselves on our ability to listen and respond to our client’s needs. 2019 saw us practising what we preach via the delivery of our own internal ‘Transform’ initiative.
Transform ensured we didn’t rest on our laurels and further strengthened our approach to the delivery of our client’s digital transformation programmes.
Wagile Approach
Our Head of Projects Grainne Blake fine-tuned our delivery approach to combine the most effective aspects of both Agile and Waterfall project management techniques. This hybrid model, termed Wagile, ensures we remain flexible during project delivery and can swiftly respond to clients’ needs, whilst maintaining overall control and accountability by linking deliverables to key milestones. Flexible agile delivery blended with the accountability and transparency of a phased and deliverables based approach.
Quality Assurance
Our expanded QA capability is the fastest growing team at Wattle and ensures a consistent and high quality of software production. Led by our Head of Testing George Woolley, the QA team are now involved in projects from initial discovery all the way through to go-live and beyond. George’s team follow a proven and phased QA approach and work diligently to ensure each software release is marketing ready.
Service Portal
The pending launch of our new and improved service portal will take our mission to be transparent and accountable to the next level. In addition to enabling our clients to submit support requests online, the portal will enable them to track every aspect of our activity across all live projects and tickets, from status, time to resolution and total time spent. An innovative dashboard will communicate all this information in seconds, ensuring our client’s are fully informed, at all times, of the progress being made for them.
Developing long lasting relationships with clients and partners continues to be a key strategic priority. With the addition of our new client services team, we can be more proactive than ever and develop innovative solutions that help our client’s stay ahead of the curve.
