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Holiday Inn stops the waterfall for technology rebranding


By Alex Handy
October 23, 2009 —  (Page 1 of 3)
In 1965, Holiday Inn became the first hotel chain in the world to utilize a central reservation system. The computerized reservation system at the heart of the hotel chain became a symbol of the company's technological vision, but 44 years later, that same reservation system remains at the heart of the company.

Steve Sullivan, manager of Web reservations, revenue and guest technology at InterContinental Hotels Group, which owns Holiday Inn, has been wrapping Web interfaces around that reservation system for seven years now. When he joined the company, his team was small and located on the same floor. Today, the team has spread out across the building and even includes outsourced members in India.

Last fall, Holiday Inn began a major rebranding, and Sullivan's team had to rework the company's Web presence. The project called for the addition of local information so that guests could find restaurants and events in the area around each hotel. That meant Sullivan's team had to integrate a new database of knowledge into the site, while also handling new art on almost every page.

Sullivan's team has hovered around 10 people, which he said is the most effective size. He also has a team of around 15 in India available to crunch when the chips are down. He said he favors open-source tooling, and his team works primarily in Eclipse, Google Web Toolkit and IntelliJ IDEA. But it's not the stack or the tools that have presented the most challenges for Sullivan and his team.

Sullivan said that the big challenge for his team now is shifting from waterfall to agile. He has begun looking into Scrum and other agile practices to help the team better meet its tight deadlines on the project.

“We decided that we were going to chunk this down into small pieces and plan out our sprints. We wanted to follow Scrum, but we couldn't do 100% Scrum because the business side had been working for a while on documents in a waterfall," said Sullivan.

 Related Search Term(s): agile

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