Crain Communications - Axioned

Crain is one of the largest privately-owned business media companies in the US. Across North America, Europe and Asia, some six million business leaders rely on Crain for the news, stories, and insights that shape their decisions.
Crain’s brands include:
- AdAge
- Automotive News
- Pensions & Investments
- Modern Healthcare and many more

What They Needed

To increase the reach and accessibility of its 55 brands, Crain has developed responsive (mobile and tablet friendly) websites to augment its printed publications.

Internal Agile/Scrum development teams at Crain got the project started, then decided to create additional sites to support the numerous annual events the business organizes.

As the scope of this new online operation grew, Crain sought out a trusted creative and technology partner.

They chose Axioned.

They chose us because retaining ownership of their online assets was a big consideration. Also important was that we could provide:
- Up to five PHP/OOP/Drupal developers and manual testers to supplement their internal Agile/Scrum team.
- Overlapping work hours between our teams in New York City and Mumbai for real-time correspondence and routine meetings.
- Fluent English language speakers for ease of communication.

The Solution

Firstly, we held interviews internally to ensure the teams we put together had the right technical skills for what Crain needed. Then, with the project teams in New York and Mumbai fully acquainted, we put a suite of cloud-based technologies in place to ensure seamless communications and collaboration between them.

These technologies included:
- Vagrant
- Atlassian JIRA
- Slack
- Google Hangouts
We also worked with Crain’s AdAge.com team to develop a Drupal website template. This would enable them to build discrete websites for events.

With our teams acting as an extension of Crain’s own internal teams, the client was able to unlock the full technical and cost saving benefits of our partnership. This also freed their team up to get other projects – until now side-lined – off the ground.
Feature development for Crain’s websites was enhanced and the debugging process became far more thorough. It was these efficiencies that allowed us to develop the additional Drupal-based event website that wouldn’t have been possible before Crain and Axioned worked together.