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Case Study: The Chartered Institute of Marketing’s Exam Successes

As the world’s leading marketing professional body The Chartered Institute of Marketing has a key role in maintaining professional standards and awarding universally recognised qualifications. A range of training programmes and other resources are open to its members worldwide. In addition to services for individual practitioners, The Institute provides close support to companies from many different industries with specially-designed team assessment and skills analysis programmes.

Via The Institute’s website, members can obtain careers support, seek job vacancies and book exams online. The site also allows visitors to pay for their membership, access exam results, and purchase books.

When, earlier this year, the site experienced slowdowns as anxious students tried to access their results, The Institute contacted SciVisum. The predicted peak capacity was exceeded as 6000 people all tried to access specific pages on the website more-or-less at the same time.

The Chartered Institute of Marketing were keen to address the problem well in advance of their August exam results. They chose a testing approach using a combination of User Journey-based website monitoring and load testing to identify any problems. This would test typical routes used by visitors when performing specific tasks such as booking an exam, booking a course or joining The Institute online – plus of course obtaining exam results.

User Journey monitoring provides a measure of website performance from the user’s perspective - following multi-page routes to make use of features and transactions or simply visiting single static pages. The performance graphs and error analysis provided by user journey monitoring can gives the client’s system engineers the information they need quickly and will enable them to pinpoint key problem areas more effectively and to sort out bottlenecks as they occur. Moreover, because the performance metrics are for User Journeys the results are something that all departments, and also third parties, can understand and share.

SciVisum’s experienced test engineers deliver UJ monitoring and Load Testing services remotely using an in-house developed test engine. For The Chartered Institute of Marketing, they were able to highlight irregular problems in some of the journeys where a growing number of visitors were receiving error pages or unacceptably long timeouts.

This User Journey approach was first used to provide 24/7 monitoring and enabled The Institute to simulate the problematic exam result journey, as well as providing Key Performance Indicators to identify exactly how well the other User Journeys were serving end users throughout each day. This was carried out prior to load testing. The resultant metrics helped The Institute pinpoint bottlenecks and identify the root causes.

The SciVisum portal, providing real-time graphs and metrics, was available to engineers throughout the monitoring, enabling them to quickly interpret any areas for attention.

Armed with the results of User Journey monitoring 24/7, SciVisum then followed up with Load Testing. This second phase was carried out to identify the size of any peak capacity shortfall and pinpoint any further infrastructure issues. Several other UJs were also load tested to ensure they would not suffer problems at high user levels.

An almost threefold increase in performance followed coding changes made by The Institute in response to early technical recommendations from the SciVIsum team. Nonetheless, the site was still unable to support access to exam results at the load expected for August without a high level of errors. The other User Journeys were shown to comfortably support the required load although there was some room for improvement on page delivery times. The load testing also identified bandwidth problems and some minor network issues.

Monitoring site performance from the perspective of the end user, with load testing on a subset of the journeys, enabled The Institute’s engineers to address the identified root causes and make significant improvements to the problematic exam results web pages. As a first optimisation, engineers restricted the size of webpage graphics and made the bulkier pages smaller to make them more efficient. The load on the servers was lightened by these improvements and the bandwidth required to serve the pages was also reduced.

The second and more important optimisation was to the server code which was amended. Finally an upgrade to some of the hardware was made. Once these adjustments were complete, SciVisum was able to perform a second load test on the exam results User Journey to see how many visits could now be handled at the same time.

This later load test showed that the changes had made a big difference. The site not only met but exceeded the required capability to handle the expected peak load for exam results. The average page delivery times for concurrent users were reduced by up to 96%. The site was found to handle the expected peak traffic easily with more than a twelve-fold improvement on the previous peak capacity figure. This was then proven in practise with no significant problems recorded when the exam results were made available in August this year.

The Chartered Institute of Marketing’s chief executive Christine Cryne commented ‘"By making use of SciVisum's monitoring our technical team were able to identify previously unknown problems with the User Journeys on our website.”

“In particular our engineers found the continuous dialogue and detailed feedback provided by SciVisum extremely useful. This helped us to pinpoint causes, improve coding and increase the volumes that our website can handle, and subsequently offer a much improved service for our members.”

Six months since monitoring began, the SV-Monitor service it is still providing The Chartered Institute of Marketing with vital information. SciVisum currently monitor eight separate User Journeys. Improvements can be seen across the web portal. The network and bandwidth issues have been resolved and all monitored features are working well.

About The Chartered Institute of Marketing

The Chartered Institute of Marketing is the leading international professional marketing body with members worldwide. It defines the marketing standards that operate in the UK and is the global champion of best marketing practice. The Institute exists to develop the marketing profession, maintain professional standards and improve the skills of marketing practitioners, enabling them to deliver exceptional results for their organisations. It does this by providing membership, qualifications and training to marketing professionals around the world. For more information please visit: www.cim.co.uk

The Chartered Institute of Marketing website
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