All aboard the Agile ship to Drupal island
The University of Edinburgh’s implementation of Drupal to replace our existing CMS is a large and complex project that pushes the boundaries of what Drupal can achieve. With significantly devolved administration, 600 content editors and over 300 subsites, the projects to design and implement the system and migrate 80,000 pages of existing content have been a significant management challenge. We decided we could build the new CMS, start migrating in content, change the design of the frontend website and then move everything into a full service management scenario. At the end of July, the development will finish and we will have migrated over half of the 300 sites/80,000 pages to our new island.
With such a large project we needed to combine project management methodologies taking aspects of Agile and PRINCE2 and merging them to suit our needs.
Join us as we sail through both calm seas and stormy waters and see if we landed successfully at our destination. This presentation will take the audience through these three years of projects. We will cover the initial desktop research and proof of concept project, requirements gathering and technical investigation through to the main development project in which the core project team have been on an Agile adventure during which they have converted the outputs of workshops and use cases into over 150 developed user stories.
We will show how to convince senior management that Drupal is the way forward and to build a leadership team. We will lay open the secrets on how we convinced the inconvincible that Drupal was the way forward. How to create and gel a project team from different business areas to one highly effective unit, co-ordinating input from across the institution. We will explain how to adapt Agile approaches for prioritising scope, managing risks and dealing with changing requirements in a complex business environment, picked the right consultancy at the right time, and how to report to stakeholders to keep them engaged and positive about the project.
Our lively presentation will enlighten the audience with our experiences, the highs and lows of a large and complex Drupal implementation. How we incorporated lessons learned along the way, how we are still learning, and where we will be heading next.