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…which lasted two weeks and culminated in a full new release of our software. I’ve written elsewhere about what happened in one week of a particular iteration in June 2008.

However, our R2 iterations didn’t just involve implementing software. At the same time each team was also working with a business analyst and end-users to plan and clarify the work for the next iteration, and sometimes getting the last iteration’s work through its systems tests prior to release. As one of the team leads said to me, “we work in three timezones”.

At the end of an iteration the release went out. But our releases didn’t always reveal much that was different — either because we were waiting to reveal it as part of a forthcoming launch, or because it was part of our internally-facing systems. That can be an odd feeling for the development teams. In previous lives I’ve worked on projects where the launch has the whole team working right up to the last moment and so also signals the time when you can collapse with exhaustion. But our interleaving of “timezones”, and releases well ahead of launches, changed that. The launch of, say, the Sports section was a big moment for so many in the company, but most of the people on the development team had finished the work some time before and were spending more time thinking about the launch that followed.

…which was launched in May 2007 and incorporated a huge amount of flexibility to tell the day’s news in different ways.

There are two major aspects to the home page’s flexibility. The first, and most obviously, is a variety of templates. In our previous system the home page had almost no flexibility at all, which was a consequence of not separating the content from the presentation — the home page was effectively a small program and changing the layout meant changing the code. That’s not something you can do in the middle of busy news day. As part of the R2 project we created a variety of templates which could be switched in largely at will. I say “largely” at will, because switching layout also means the various areas of the page are spaced differently, some growing and others shrinking, so you need to make sure they all have the right amount of content in them.

The second kind of flexibility is in what you can do on the page. Any one template has internal logic which changes the layout subtly according to where a production staffer marks a break or places an image or video.

We launched our new home page early on 10 May 2007. Around midday Tony Blair announced he was stepping down as prime minister. The event gave the news desk the chance to make use of many alternative templates in various configurations. In the tech team we would check back at the home page throughout the day to see yet another template was on show for the first time. By the end of the day our new software had been given more of a workout than we could have guessed, but it served us all admirably.

…which was not part of the project scope when we started R2. It’s fair to say that when we began implementing in February 2006, the idea of a Guardian America launch was not on the radar. Yet by the middle of 2007 it was being talked about very seriously, and increasingly so. How did we fit in an additional sub-project?

As much as technologists might sometimes think they hold the key to success, when it comes to media it’s still true that content is king. Guardian America’s success is driven from its editor, Michael Tomasky, and his team. But technology did provide the vehicle for that.

The most valuable thing we technologists did for Guardian America was to not reinvent the wheel. We recognised that the core elements had already been built — most notably a front page designed to showcase a variety of content was already in use as the guardian.co.uk front. Making use of that also ensured design consistency. But that’s not to say there was no work to do. The content management system was not originally designed to support two major fronts, particularly with a variation in branding. The core work, then, was to extend something we had already delivered and make it more useful.

Using this approach everyone won. The Guardian America team got all the functionality and flexibility that we had delivered for the team running the original site front, and they got it relatively quickly. From an operational point of view, by managing Guardian America in the same way the guardian.co.uk front was managed, the GA team was able to share skills, people, advice and creative ideas. The tech team got to show they could deliver technology for a high-profile project on very short timescales. The business as a whole won because the overall R2 budget remained constant. We managed that by deprioritising a small amount of less important work in the usual Agile manner. I don’t think there were any arguments about what, exactly, was deprioritised, since Guardian America was so clearly more significant than many other features on our list.