The Propane Education & Research Council (PERC) is a nationally recognized nonprofit dedicated to promoting education, safety, and training resources within the propane industry. PERC manages a complex network of 30 interconnected websites, which over time, had become plagued with issues of speed, organization, operational efficiency and governance.
After a successful User Experience and Content Strategy assessment, PERC approached Fuel Digital about taking on the responsibility of overhauling their entire IT and development landscape across all domains. A highly engaged and responsive Fuel team has delivered major impacts to the organization in less than 5 months:
TIME: Site performance was inadequate. Anonymous users were experiencing page times high enough to cause SEO ranking concerns.
- Cut page load in half across all user segmentations, higher for anonymous users due to leveraging of cache at multiple levels.
- Identified and rectified ill-performing 3rd party plugins.
- Established a roadmap to improve Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Contentful Paint (FCP) and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS).
MONEY: Much better return on spending. By right sizing the existing cloud services, removing unnecessary services and consolidating services we have dramatically increased the ROI of PERC’s IT investments.
- Moved supporting systems and APIs from vender-hosted to containerized.
- Leveraged hybrid architectures to optimize cloud services based on cost.
- Recovered spending will be retargeted to establish proof-of-concepts using AI.
PEACE OF MIND: Implemented DevOps processes and automation to deliver reliable, frequent and stable releases.
- Built multiple testing environments that better reflect behaviors in production.
- Created build-and-release pipelines to support CI/CD.
- Established a quality assurance methodology.
Our engagement began with a crucial transitional phase, where we meticulously documented high-priority issues, identified overarching challenges, and crafted a strategic plan with both short-term and long-term goals. This strategic approach ensured that we could deliver swift improvements while laying a robust foundation for sustainable progress.
Given the extensive nature of PERC’s infrastructure and the regular influx of issues, Fuel adopted an Agile project management methodology. Within the first few weeks, we developed a prioritized backlog and initiated three-week sprints. Our development team tackled various tasks, adhering to scrum practices, including:
- Daily Stand-ups: Collaborating with key PERC staff to align on daily agendas.
- Backlog Refinement Sessions: Categorizing and prioritizing tasks.
- Sprint Planning: Assigning tasks and estimating effort required.
- Retrospectives: Reflecting on completed sprints to identify areas for improvement.
Over several months of close collaboration with PERC’s staff, we have successfully addressed a wide range of needs, from content updates and data operations to providing comprehensive e-commerce solutions, DevOps, and DevSecOps. Our agile and proactive approach has not only resolved immediate challenges but also positioned PERC for ongoing success.
Fuel Digital is excited to continue our partnership with PERC, driving innovation and excellence in their digital initiatives for years to come.
