National Sports Organization’s Architecture Modernization Leads to Streamlined CMS and Publishing Workstream

Introduction

A national sports organization outgrew their current content infrastructure. In order to promote functionality and speed of delivery within the editorial experience, they decided to assess both front-end and back-end development, with focus on the publishing workflow, publish times, redundancy, and video ingestion issues across dozens of content channels.

After helping redesign the client’s storefront, the client recognized Levvel as a natural fit to drive digital architecture efforts from proof-of-concept to production launch.

Challenge

The client’s digital platform was split between two independent content management systems (CMS)—one powering league experiences (league content) and the other powering dozens of individual team sites (team content). This caused overlapping functionality, disjointed content, and difficulty building front-end components.

Approach

Levvel’s mission was to lead this editorial modernization effort through evaluation, strategy, and implementation. These steps would help introduce a solution that could allow their front-end and back-end to evolve independently without lock-in or reliance on a specific CMS.

This three-phase approach involved:

• Evaluation: Levvel met with technical teams and stakeholders to gain insights into their digital platform. They could document existing architecture and data flows, as well as consider the use cases, business requirements, and architectural changes.
• Strategy Assessment: A set of recommendations was generated to build new consumer experiences, streamline editorial workflows, and ensure long-term growth through a decoupled architecture.
• Implementation: Weekly sprints were outlined with internal teams to plan, report, deploy, and execute these initiatives. The key factors were decoupling the CMS and refactoring the API.

Results

The national sports organization was able to modernize their current CMS platform to a headless model to allow for greater flexibility, reduce costs, and enable a more efficient workflow. Internally, the impact of this updated editorial workstream helped reduce tech debt, enhance automation, and improve speed of delivery.

Download the PDF

You can access the PDF here.