…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.