A ServicePower had historically grown by acquisition and operated each development team independently, as the new CTO one of the key strategies was to unify the teams, in terms of processes, technology and promote tighter product integration. To do this we developed an initiative called Unified Platform (UP for short) and a key component of that was to develop a central integration layer that would allow inter product communication and provide clients with a much simpler and more modern integration layer. The existing products all had their own API's some exposing SOAP and others exposing RESTful, each product had similar or related types of service data, methods and events, but naming conventions and objects were structured differently.

Process

• Developed the UP initiative with my senior management team, which would span all product development teams including both internal and outsourced resources.

• Designed a charter which we would use to promote and educate the entire ServicePower organization so that the entire company was in sync, understood what UP was, how it was to be developed, what it meant for their department and over what timelines we would be working.

• We developed a whole series of documents around UP called What's UP and provided the company with regular updates as to how we progressed through the design and development.  

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Results

Service Broker version 1 initially took a very small subset of key SOAP API's and merged them to provide a singular set of RESTful API's allowing clients to check for appointment and service job availability and status across 2 separate backed products. Following this version 2 added additional API's for data maintenance. Version 3 was the initial development of incorporating the Gantt Chart which originally used a custom TCP/IP socket based protocol and replaced it with a set of RESTful API's to facilitate the new UI and additional features being added. 

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