Optimising for maintainability – Gleam in production at Strand

Summary

Strand is a marketing agency based in London, UK. The company specialises in copywriting and content creation for many of the world’s largest enterprise technology companies, running marketing programmes that produce hundreds of white papers, case studies, blog posts and articles every year. Challenge For many years, Strand has relied on a custom-built project management system to support the operational aspects of its business—creating projects, tracking activities and managing documents. However, managing the financial aspects of project management had always been a more manual process, using spreadsheets to ensure that billable work was assigned to the correct purchase orders and invoices. “Just before the pandemic, we decided to build a new financial management system,” recalls Ed Kelly, Director of Technology at Strand. “It turned out to be a very timely decision. When we had to pivot to remote working, the fact that everyone could track their billable work in a centralised system helped us keep the business on track.” The new system quickly became an integral part of Strand’s daily workflow, and users began requesting new features. As the application gradually grew larger and more complex, the company’s small development team wanted to ensure that the system would remain reliable, maintainable and scalable. “Almost by accident, what we launched as a prototype became a business-critical application,” says Ed Kelly. “Our development resources are limited, so our top priority was to make sure the system would just run forever without needing constant maintenance. At the same time, we also wanted to keep the codebase simple and approachable, so it’s easy for developers to dive back into when they need to make a change. The challenge for us was to build and maintain this business-critical system cost-effectively with our lean development team.” Solution As a small business, Strand is not afraid to innovate. “We do have systems that are written in mainstream program...