It’s always beneficial getting round the table to share our ideas with a view to creating even better systems and processes as we move forward. Last week we held our quarterly roundtable event on managing third parties for peak performance.
Tribe’s ‘roundtable’ events are popular with clients and other delivery partners, who are keen to learn from each other’s experiences.
The issue of managing third parties is a growing challenge and one that faces all organisations with a web presence. So informed discussions on how others approach this is hugely beneficial.
September’s breakfast meeting at the Eight Members Club in Moorgate was attended by thinkTRIBE clients and partners from multiple sectors – including Anne Summers, Boden, Just Eat and HMV amongst others. James Williams Head of online operations at Jigsaw, opened the meeting by sharing his extensive experience of managing performance on Jigsaw’s international ecommerce sites.
A problem shared
The challenges around the topic of managing third parties formed the crux of the morning’s discussions, including the problems around gaining visibility of third party issues and the difficulties associated with making third parties accountable, particularly the larger players such as Paypal. Also ways of gaining more information to better understand the wider context when a third party is down. Third party elements are numerous and often inherited. Often third party errors are not serious or customer facing so understanding which are is a challenge in it’s own right. Monitoring that only reports errors which impact customers is a step in the right direction.
Understandably letting third parties mark their own homework doesn’t instil confidence so most advocate an independent test service for the confidence they need. For most organisations keeping their third parties as close as possible is the best way to resolve issues quickly and use of monitoring data, not to berate them but to help them improve. A key way to work more closely and speed the resolution of issues, is to allow third parties direct access to monitoring data and alerting.
With Black Friday looming, peak preparation inevitably became a topic for discussion including traffic profiling, load testing and contingency solutions. Further discussions included the use of RUM to understand the scale of problems identified by synthetic monitoring and the challenges of managing international ecommerce.
Come and join in the conversation
thinkTRIBE regularly hosts roundtable events like this exclusively for small groups of web professionals. Our briefings open with performance insights from a leading UK based brand and provide a platform to:
· Build relationships with industry peers · Gather insights on good practice from top brands · Gain valuable networking opportunities · Influence the development of web performance solutions · Implement ideas that improve conversions
A complimentary breakfast is included and places are free, but limited. If you’d like to receive an invitation to our next round table event, please complete the form below or give us a call on 01227 768276.