Cricket Leinster

Cricket Leinster are the governing body for the sport of cricket in Leinster. It encompasses more than 40 cricket clubs and many schools and is responsible for the development, promotion and organisation of cricket within Leinster.

In July 2018 Cricket Leinster began a tendering process to build a new website and management system to replace their current website.

The current website had been built in 2011. The platform had become out of date making it difficult to manage and maintain. The branding was inconsistent across the site and new features were difficult to add to the outdated software. While mobile users where the largest demographic the site was not mobile friendly.

Cricket Leinster wanted a new mobile friendly application built that would allow them to:

• Retain all of their existing functionality and data
• Inspire and engage with the current Cricket Leinster fans and encourage new members to join
• To promote the organisation, their rich history, become a key component in their strategy to expand the game in Leinster. To feature and promote their interprovincial team, Leinster Lightning
• Feature their sponsors more prominently across the content on the site
• Allow members to pay their membership fees online
• Allow for live scoring of Cricket games to appear on the site

As part of our approach to the process, we completed a full analysis of their current applications. We looked at many cricketing sites from around the world and looked at different sports and how they catered to their members. Based on this research and feedback from Cricket Leinster, we created a detailed approach to the building the new application. During this process we also identified a number of new features for the site that would enhance user engagement. These included:

• Match Centre - designed to include more complex functionality of live scoring and would also allow historical match data to be accessible to the user.
• 'My Cricket Leinster' - a new section allowing all the different types of members from fans, players, captains, club administrators, umpires, scorers to interact with the site differently, dependent on their role
• Bulk Upload/bulk edit functionality - thousands of fixtures were being manually added individually. We proposed a software solution to handle these in bulk, reducing the time and effort required to handle this data significantly.

Our team reviewed the current site, database structures, functionality, and software codebases. We created a detailed functional specification document, and planned a data migration process for the current data to the new application.

Our team met with Cricket Leinster over several meetings, discovered and defined all the new required functionality.

During this process we identified a number of administrative processes that were extremely time consuming and offered software solutions to reduce the time and effort involved. For example each year 2000+ fixtures were manually added to the site one by one, all bulk updates to the fixtures where also edited one by one. We suggested a bulk upload and bulk edit process allowing Cricket Leinster to quickly and easily bulk upload data and bulk edit data to the new system.

We then prepared a functional specification document outlining all functionality the application should deliver in detail for Cricket Leinster. We created a design and development plan to deliver the complex application within 4 months ready for the new season cricket season.

The new application functionality included:

• Brand new website with customisable and updatable home page
• Fully mobile responsive
• Feature rich News section
• Match Center fully integrated with 3rd party data providers, as well as the option to provide live scoring and live updates from the application and Twitter.
• Fixtures and results
• Club management system
• Team and player management system, including a team picker system for team captains
• Member registration and management systems, including credit card payment integration
• Administration area for Cricket Leinster to update the site

The go-live deadline for the launch of the website was short considering the volume and complexity of the work to be completed. One of the ways we managed this was to create the design and proceed with the code development simultaneously. We successfully completed the build and design for the launch date, in time for the new cricket season.