Coke's marketing department had a mindshare repository that was updated and published each year in a printed book format. They wanted to convert this knowledge base to an interactive website, to restructure the content, and incorporate a highly stylized design as directed by the visual design team. Both the technical team (us) and the visual designers were third party teams that needed to coordinate with Coke IT to get it done.
On the surface, this looked like a daunting HTML production job. But since the project scope was well above and beyond the design group's typical project scope, in terms of technical requirements, it was clear that the standard development processes couldn't ensure a timely, controlled release, and that this would be a daunting process engineering job as well. The project had already suffered some setbacks and Coca Cola had gone through two other technical resources without success. Not only was the project challenging, much of the time for it had been burned up by technical teams that had been dismissed.
The challenges.
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The development process
The designers were of the "every pixel counts" philosophy and we needed to be able to deliver pixel perfect renditions of their designs for a vast amount of content in a very short period time. In the end it was more than 450 pages of content, each individually built, and composed of myriad subsections that incorporated distinct designs and layouts.
The designers, accustomed to print design and simple brochure-ware sites, used development processes insufficient for a voluminous software project. Without some new control processes, forward progress would grind to a halt as the team spent more and more time maintaining the existing work. We'd have to introduce these new processes, and get stakeholders' approval to do it.
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Deployment risks
In addition, several of the designs called for technically complex components, including an intricately interactive menu, and nested framesets.
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The technical requirements.
Due to security policy beyond the Coca Cola's control, we were unprivileged developers. Coca Cola was unable to grant us access to their internal staging servers when we needed to begin work. This meant we'd be throwing software over the wall to the client, without the ability to truly test and troubleshoot in their target environment. And the design team's review process didn't support this situation.
This qualified as a high-risk project, because of the short time frame available both to produce the content and to instill new development and review processes.
Read about what we did 
