Our Work

BBC’s Top Gear brand was distributed across several websites around the BBC infrastructure, implemented with various technologies. As part of the preparation for moving to a centralised Drupal system, they asked us to discover the complexity on the data migration. We were given ten days to discover the challenges involved in migrating each part of the existing system.

The current status turned out to be hugely complex. A large amount of the system information architecture was unknown, forcing us to discover the relationship between data types. The system was implemented partially in a proprietary technology, making the access hard.

From the assigned ten days, we spent four connecting the original data sources to the migration process, two days analysing the information architecture and the remaining four days creating the new prototype content management system and developing the migration code.

During the information architecture research phase we created several entity relationship models and collectively gained a deeper understanding of the individual parts of the system. Because of the complex migration, it was crucial to define the dependencies between migrated content items.

URL: www.topgear.com 

The end result was that we delivered migration code, the final database, documentation, mapping charts and documentation to BBC Top Gear. This helped them to understand their information architecture and the challenges for further data migration. 

Other key benefits were:

• Discovered 90% of data following review of complex legacy systems, including those that had obsolete or non-existent parts
• Delivered all the items required in order to complete the migration on time - prepared code, final database, documentation and mapping charts
• Successfully standardised data format ready for migration to the content management system
• Gained a deeper understanding of the challenges to be expected in future migrations